Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks)

Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks)

Posted Oct 16, 2006 23:07 UTC (Mon) by gravious (subscriber, #7662)
In reply to: Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks) by ajross
Parent article: Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks)

I am only just starting down the ruby road but let me tell you what I have learnt thus far.

As the article explains (and as the tutorials on the Rails site show) there is quite a bit of magic because rails infers the field names and table names from the names you give stuff in the ruby code - as they say "convention over configuration". And that's nice. I mean id generally is your primary key, is it not?

You are wrong about the web server requirement. Rails ships with a default web server to get you going quickly Webrick (written in Ruby) but it requires just a one line change to tell it to use Apache or (to name an up and coming candidate) Mongrel.

PHP is cool. I love it - Ruby on Rails is new. You are right to be sceptical as to it's long term maintainability, I guess we'll find out in the long term :) From what I can see Rails seems to have hit a sweet spot - it is probably inadvisable to call it a toy. Also the fact that prototype.js seems to have grown out of Rails is kudos enough in some ways give the evilness of Javascript.

{okay I confess - any language that turns literals into full blown objects, has inspired a poignant guide to itself, that has come from Japan, and has spawned the most left-field database driven web application framework out there is going to get my attention... live and let live huh, there's room for us all :) }

to.each { |there| there.own }

Anthony

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