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Itinerant computer programmer, martial artist, erstwhile photographer, and general seeker of truth. (more)

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February 05, 2007

Riding on Rails

@entry image

If you’re even mildly interested in web development, you’ve probably heard the hype over Ruby on Rails that’s been building over the past few years (if not, you have got to get out from under that rock :-). Being predominantly a Perl hacker, it took me a while to download it and take it out for a spin on some projects. Well, after about 3 weeks of intensive work in the framework, I can honestly say, it’s made web development fun for me again. It was so inspiring, I rewrote my blog software in Ruby just for the hell of it! (Speaking of which, if you notice anything weird with the site, please let me know). Kudos to Rails and its developers, I drank the kool-aid and you guys have blown me away.

Posted by moon at 07:01:00 PM in Site IT, Geek

Comments

Yep, I feel the same. Rails development is really enjoyable and powerful. I still work in Perl most of the time in web development but my time spent in Rails always seems to fly by compared to the relative grind of perl apps :)

Nice blog update.

Posted by Cal at 09:17:34 AM February 06, 2007 | http://www.calgoodman.com

Hey Cal, great to “see” you man. Hope you’re well :-)

Posted by moon at 12:27:00 PM February 06, 2007

I had been dabling in ROR as well but I do most of my work in PHP. I was certainly blown away by the speed and ease of setting up the scaffolding but I found that to do more than that it would take time customizing. I would love to hear more about your, Cal’s or anyone else’s experience with ROR.

cg

Posted by the other cg at 07:16:01 PM February 13, 2007 | Email

Hey CG!

Scaffolding is definitely cool, but you’re right – it definitely takes some customization if you need it to do anything besides the basics.

For me, I generally get a kick out the following features of rails (which aren’t necessarily specific to rails per-se but that rails does give you out of the box for free):

  • Numerous code-generation tools
  • The DB schema generation and versioning tools
  • Nice Model-View-Controller separation
  • The intelligent ActiveRecord data entity classes
  • nice plug-in architecture
  • The request routing configurability
  • The integration with a variety of AJAX tools
  • The list goes on…

Generally I find that so much work has gone into the base classes ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActionView, etc., and it’s general emphasis on DRY coding, that it eliminates a lot of the tedious web code and allows you to focus on the interesting problems.

Also I really like Ruby as a whole, although I’m still getting the hang of it, it’s been a real pleasure to use so far.

Anyway, hope that’s a start :-)

-Moon

Posted by moon at 07:24:00 PM February 13, 2007 | Email

I finally decided to face my destiny and learn how to program. Josh pointed me down the RoR path. RoR rawks from the perspective of a total rookie - I’ve been able to hack together some pretty cool stuff using various plugins, generators, things like Scriptaculous, scrAPI, etc.

Learning how to program is challenging, but I’m really digging it. - Kris

Posted by kris at 07:06:00 PM April 28, 2007 | Email | http://broceanography.com

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