Ruby on Rails
Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 03 Dec 2005 19:32:00 GMT
I have been working on a web site for my son’s baseball club, Tri-Cities Baseball, with my wife Suzanne and our friend Steve Cousins, and it has been a lot of fun.
Suzanne has been doing the graphical design and static pages, and Steve and I have been working on the registration part using Ruby on Rails (RoR).
RoR is a fantastic environment that makes it easy to develop, deploy and maintain web applications, particularly for doing data-base backed web sites.
Ruby by itself is a great object oriented language, that provides all the benefits of object orientation, without the downfalls of pure(object(languages(like(lisp)))). (That was a Lisp joke. ;-)
Rails is a framework that uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and a Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy so your code is cleaner and easier to maintain. It also includes a object-relation mapping so that it is easy to store and retrieve stuff without having to write a bunch of low level SQL. It also handles sessions and uses a lot of conventions over configuration, which lets you get down to work rather than spending a lot of time setting stuff up.
It is always hard to learn a new language AND a new framework, but it is amazing how much we were able to accomplish in a short time starting at zero.
Another indication of how easy it is to develop applications in RoR is that even though it has only been around for about a year and a half, there are already an incredible amount of applications available using it, including blogs, wikis, bug tracking, project tracking, accounting, forums, picture galleries, and more. For comparison, Java has been around for over 10 years, and it still doesn’t have some of the applications available in RoR!