Heipei

So, i have made the incredibly wise decision to start learning Ruby on Rails while im home for a week. Wise because my Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails book is in my bookshelf in Aachen … don’t ask.

What can i say so far? Wow! There are a lot of hypes, and i am always careful about those kinda people which want to propagate an image of the ultimate solution, the cure to every problem there is. Let me start by saying: No, Ruby and the Rails framework are not perfect nor do they fit every problem. But when it comes to database-driven web development they are certainly one of the easiest things to use. I dont know what the future will bring, and although O’Reilly’s Ruby book sales already overtook the Python books, there is no saying what cool new things the future might bring.

Having said this, rails is something everyone should give a try. So far i only developed web applications (just small scripts, a guestbook, stuff like that) with Perl or PHP. In retrospect i still love Perl, but for the web applications it sucked imho. PHP was okay, but i dont think i have to eloborate on certain PHP shortcomings here. Rails has the great advantage on being built ontop of Ruby, a very clean, simple and easy object-oriented programming language. Now Ruby has been around some time, and is a full-blown complete language, you can use it outside any web environment without a problem.

Rails is a framework (get used to that term and make sure you know what it means ;) which does a lot of those tedious tasks for you. It creates a directory structure, provides its own webserver for development, handles connection to your database, simplifies stuff like AJAX or authentication.

Its my first day, and i probably just sratched the cool things, but im already very impressed. Stay tuned.

[tags]ruby, rails, ajax, web, development[/tags]