What Is This Rails Thing?
Posted on 01. Oct, 2007 by Ash Christopher in Software Development
A few weeks ago, I downloaded an eBook on Ruby on Rails and gave the first few chapters a read. It was decently interesting, and it sounded like something I would like to get into. I am not a fan of eBooks, so I decided I would spring for a physical copy.
The book covers Rails development from the beginners level to the fairly advanced. It offers an easy tutorial which one can follow along, and gives a decent amount of information about most of the features they have available.
One of the biggest features that the Rails framework offers is migration. Although it is a fairly small part of Rails, it is a technology which I know is useful to many companies. At Pason, we created our own technology that basically does the same task as migration. It would have been nice to just use the Rails’ migration instead of developing our own.
The biggest issue I am having now, is getting back into the Python-style of coding. Ruby and Python are fairly similar… and very much different from Java and C++ which I am more familiar with. There are also a few speedbumps I am noticing when working on my first Rails project, but I hope to overcome them soon.
Wes
01. Oct, 2007
I found learning Rails to be quite fun, and you may want to start playing with 2.0, as it looks to be ‘released’ very soon. It you loved migrations before, you’ll love what they’ve done with them now.
Ash Christopher
01. Oct, 2007
It seems really neat, and I can really see it helping get something prototyped quickly. My biggest problem now is getting familiar with the framework. When I developed in PHP I had direct control over everything, but it was also a crap-load more work to get something working.
My latest issue which I have moved to the backburner in light of other things on this project deals with uploading files. I have looked at this tutorial (http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUploadFiles) , but I can’t seem to get it to go. It is a simple thing I am trying to do, and in PHP, it would have taken maybe 10 minutes to get it all working. It has taken considerably longer with Rails, but alas I am trying to learn as I go. I guess I shouldnt be too disappointed.
Also, crap, maybe I should have held out for the third edition of this book. Oh well.
Adam
05. Oct, 2007
I’ve found too many limitations with Rails. As Ash has said; it’s great for quick prototyping.. but then again so is Visio if you’re just going for a visual prototype.
I’m leaning towards Flex right now as the next thing to use and have some fun with. PHP is great; Silverlight is a POS; and the Google Web Toolkit just scares me due to the upgrades constantly required and the browser dependency.