In Awe of Ruby on Rails

Filed in archive Programming on November 11, 2005

Today was a quiet day because it is Veterans Day and I am home with my son while my wife goes off to work. I awoke early and looked over some TODO items I have in my calendar. One of the items was learning complex ORM with Xdolet and Hibernate. The other was sitting down with Ruby on Rails and seeing what it has to offer. I choose the latter and I was glad I did because I walked away being more excited about programming than I have in a long time.

The specific article I followed was Curt Hibb's article titled Rolling with Ruby on Rails. Keep in mind that I've never touched the Rails framework before trying this tutorial. Anyway, after installing everything, which was really easy, the examples worked without incident. The Rails framework follows a MVC pattern that I'm used to seeing and with a single command a skeleton of a web application is created on my development system (e.g. rails cookbook). The Rails framework also includes it's own web server to play with the scripts you have created (e.g. ruby scriptserver). But the most interesting piece during the entire lesson for me was the simplicity in which the framework connects to a database and lays out a sample series of CRUD operations via a web interface. By adding a controller to your project, again with a single command, by executing "ruby scriptgenerate controller Recipe" and adding the line "scaffold :recipe" to that controller a developer can perform CRUD operations upon a database table via their web application. The article goes into the process further by allowing you to customize the pages being used for these operations. I played around with things and started to get excited about how easy it is to get things going. My learning curve still has a while to go but I'm going to continue this learning process. These Ruby folks have put a lot of thought into this stuff and it shows.

After all of this I've committed to myself that I will be using Ruby on Rails on future projects. That usage probably won't be on anything very large at first but for those smaller projects I'm going to be using this new framework. Java is still the standard for corporate projects these days and I don't see that changing very quickly. My view on this is that Ruby on Rails will just be one more tool on my tool belt. I hope to be able to direct folks from here to one of my Ruby on Rails applications soon.