Riding on Rails

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.

5 Comments

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Cal 02.06.07 / 9am

1

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.
moon 02.07.07 / 12pm

2

Hey Cal, great to “see” you man. Hope you’re well :-)
the other cg 02.13.07 / 7pm

3

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
moon 02.14.07 / 7pm

4

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
kris 04.28.07 / 7pm

5

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

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About

My name is Moon Lee, and you're reading my blog. I’m a software engineer, martial artist, husband, and father. In the last few years, I’ve lived in Denver, London and Beijing, but now call Chicago my home, where I live with my small family.

My professional work site is viewable at www.codeflow.net.

I spent most of 2006 studying Yiquan with Master Yao Chengguang in Beijing and was given permission to teach Yiquan as a coach of the Beijing Zongxun Wuguan. If you’re looking for information on Yiquan you can visit www.yiquan.us.

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