Anthillpro is a continuous integration server from Urbancode. It supports the software Java, Ruby, .Net and native technologies. The free 30 days trial vesion can be downloaded from here. You will get a flavor of Developer Pre-flight Builds in this new version.  Pre-flight Builds let developers run a "test build" of their changes without making the changes to source. Pre-flight Builds integrates the developer's changes with a snapshot of the latest source code, and then run a build in the build environment,  not on the developer's machine by the click of a button. In case of failure of pre-build, you, as a developer,  will be notified immediately. Since, pre-flight build run on their own environment , you can access to the hardware and other resources which would have been inaccessible if you run them on your own machine.  As a developer, you will also be able to run parallel test to reduce the actual test time with the help of this tool.

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Ruby needs no special introduction in the world of object oriented programming. With the slow decline of Java over the years, Ruby has caught the eyes with its  dynamic and reflective programming paradigms.

Ruby on Rails is an extension based on Ruby itself. It is an open source web application framework based on Ruby programming language which is often utilized by web developers for its suitability.

Grails, previously known as Groovy on Rails is an open source web application framework which leverages the Groovy programming language (based on the Java platform).

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Why does finally have to have braces?

I can do this:

if(condition) statement;

and even this:

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I tried delving into Ruby couple of times in the past. Every time I had this weird feeling of what am I doing here when I am already very well conversant with a simpler language - Java, which gives me everything I need. Ruby just felt very syntax rich, may ways and interesting tricks to do stuff and so on.While these may be appealing to a script-kiddie, nice syntactical sugars do not help much in the long run or help you create robust code (unless you love flying whales and a service which fails every other day).

I am not afraid of developing CRUD interfaces nor do I find it time consuming. What value can I get from RoR? Every time I delve into Ruby & RoR, I come back feeling unsatisfied. What am I missing here?

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