The Greenpeace International Application Development Team is currently learning Ruby on Rails by writing an application during a three-day retreat.

Yesterday we dropped by for a few hours together with Andy to help the developers get started. Because of networking issues we didn’t get as far as we’d hoped, but after a few hours everybody was at least up and running.

This morning we ran the developers through a 90-minute crash course explaining the basics of Rails. It still amazes me how PHP and Java developers suddenly get this somewhat amazed but very happy look on their face when they realize how much nicer using Rails is going to be compared to the stuff they’ve been doing before.

You can follow the efforts of the development team on their weblog.