Its always fun to be recognized, but it was a real treat to have Dave Thomas mention us during the opening keynote at RailsConf this week. I found him in the hallway later and thanked him for the kind words, and in classic Dave fashion, his response was: "No problem -- now live up to it." Dave, we hope we will.

The topic of Dave's keynote was the "3 Unsolved Problems" of Rails. His second problem was lack of good CRUD support, specifically anemic scaffolding. Its no secret that the scaffolding in Rails is what brings most people in, but is also the first thing left on the cutting room floor when people start really getting into it. We think this is a shame.

The idea of scaffolding isn't the problem; the implementation is. Companies with lots of internal projects with rapid deployment schedules (dare I say "enterprise") need a way to quit worrying about the same stuff every time they whip up a new app. Specifically, layout, relationship management, add/update/delete features, find and sort, etc. The stuff that dev teams waste thousands of hours recreating app after app, even on the same team for the same company.

We've been struggling with that problem both internally and with our customers, and we've taken the tools that we've been building over time and are going to release it as an open source addition to Rails. We're calling it Streamlined. The first public release will be at OSCON in July, but you can check out the blog now for features, futures, screenshots and technical details.