How good is Ruby on Rails?!

-God-

-God-

He is Planet
Jun 22, 2009
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I've been having some down time of late and decided to learn Ruby on Rails. I'm pretty good with a few PHP and am near fluent in XHTML but Rails makes me fucking hard.

I've only done a few small things - working through a number of tutorials - but it looks as though it's going to rewrite all my opinions on webdev. I didn't enjoy learning HTML, PHP was fun in parts, although slow, but this is something else. It's blowing my fucking mind. It's coming across as a real game changer to me.

I had to tell someone to see if my thoughts are unfounded. Anyone worked with it much? Opinions?
 


Yep, Ruby has established itself as a viable contender for Perl's "king of the dynamic web" crown. In fact, it's a lot like Perl, except the documentation is patronizing and the usual response to a bug report is a personal attack. That makes it cool, though. After all that up-and-coming new web 2.0 site Twitter uses it for everything and there's no sign that they'll be plagued by outages, slowdowns, and security breeches, forcing panic-driven development of a whole new backend in Scala. Yep, scalability, performance, elegant design and security, one word springs to mind: Rails. BTW I just heard this amazing new track from Justin Timberlake, I think it's called Sexyback? It's bangin. I'm listening to it on my new 5 gig ipod.
 
(I'm not going to get into any scaling/resource utilization arguments here or framework pissing matches.)

Rails is very useful in that you can build a full app quick. You can get your idea live with minimal fuss and do 99% of what all webapps just need in general done with the stock framework. It's a framework borne out of needing to get your money-making web project live asap but not getting stuck in the pick a db, make an admin backend, fiddle with sql models, etc etc steps - create the skeleton, add your initial models and filler data, and you've got a nicely seperated dev/production app live.

Ruby is a very nice language in that you can quickly sling around objects. You can get as verbose or sloppy as you like. It has some functional programming elements in it too.

I've done lots of webdev in all the usual suspects, but really prefer Rails. Even contributed some to the core back in the day when I gave a shit. And now having to deal with PHP/smarty/pecl apps is a nightmare.
 
I plan on learning RoR very soon. I've heard it's really good from a lot of former php lovers I know.


JCash said:
Yep, Ruby has established itself as a viable contender for Perl's "king of the dynamic web" crown. In fact, it's a lot like Perl, except the documentation is patronizing and the usual response to a bug report is a personal attack. That makes it cool, though. After all that up-and-coming new web 2.0 site Twitter uses it for everything and there's no sign that they'll be plagued by outages, slowdowns, and security breeches, forcing panic-driven development of a whole new backend in Scala. Yep, scalability, performance, elegant design and security, one word springs to mind: Rails. BTW I just heard this amazing new track from Justin Timberlake, I think it's called Sexyback? It's bangin. I'm listening to it on my new 5 gig ipod.
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Twitter is actually moving away from RoR. Not sure how much they are still using though
 
rails is for people who like to make money because they can build things quickly as opposed to jackoffs that want to measure their epeen based on the total lines of code they wrote from scratch in their projects.

Scaling Rails is a non issue as people have repeatedly grown it to support millions of visitors a day. Motherfucking Hulu runs on Rails. Twitter is inherently hard to scale and if you have even a basic understanding of database design, you would know it would be hard to scale on any platform. They've migrated away from Rails and STILL fail whale daily.

I built this: hubfrenzy.com last weekend on Rails in less than 20 hours. And I enjoyed it the entire time.

Rails is the shit, and it's not forgiving for newbie coders. And that's a great thing, because it means you have extremely good coders using it professionally, so the quality of code available online is fantastic. Script kiddies can't use Rails.
 
dchuk said:
rails is for people who like to make money because they can build things quickly as opposed to jackoffs that want to measure their epeen based on the total lines of code they wrote from scratch in their projects.
Click to expand...

Based on that alone, i'd have to say PHP builds things just as quickly as well, just depends on who is coding it and how they did it.

Not starting flame wars, I could care less which lang is better. You and Mattseh know I always say, "code whatever you can get it done in". If you can get it coded in Rails faster then Django, then great. If you can get it coded in PHP/MySQL faster then you can in Snap ( haskell ), then awesome too.

With that said, I'm planning to go thru the Rails Zombie tutorial that Leeward posted tomorrow though.
 
RoR is pretty good, Django/Python is the same but in a different language, but better in my opinion as Python syntax is very simple and easy to understand (easier to learn than RoR) - WTF is my usual reaction when I see Ruby code.
 
JCash said:
Yep, Ruby has established itself as a viable contender for Perl's "king of the dynamic web" crown. In fact, it's a lot like Perl, except the documentation is patronizing and the usual response to a bug report is a personal attack. That makes it cool, though. After all that up-and-coming new web 2.0 site Twitter uses it for everything and there's no sign that they'll be plagued by outages, slowdowns, and security breeches, forcing panic-driven development of a whole new backend in Scala. Yep, scalability, performance, elegant design and security, one word springs to mind: Rails. BTW I just heard this amazing new track from Justin Timberlake, I think it's called Sexyback? It's bangin. I'm listening to it on my new 5 gig ipod.
Click to expand...

Only nerds and crazy people who do something called "blogging" (new term, search it in altavista if you are not sure) use that service twitter.
 
If you're having trouble wrapping your head around Rails, maybe try working through the Django Book as a primer on MVC web dev. I use Django 'cause I like Python, but whatever works for you. Yeah, Rails is good, way better to use a solid framework than fuck around building your own user authentication, templating, ORM, etc.

If you know PHP already, why not check out something like Symfony?
 
I'll have to check Django next, because Python's something I also find interesting.

Bofu2U said:
I hear that shit. Just started a few months ago in my "spare time" with it, it's a fun little bastard when you get going, though.

Hit me up on Skype (contempt.me) maybe I can help. :)
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I'm not even doing it in just my spare time. I wanna continue to learn it the moment I'm up. :)

Added to Skype.


lwbco said:
Code School - RailsForZombies
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Thanks, will check it out.

pinchyfingers said:
If you know PHP already, why not check out something like Symfony?
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I will, thanks. I'm a hobby coder though, so liked the idea of learning something new, which is exciting, than expanding on something I already know.
 
I know from experience that Django is 10x better than symfony 1 (haven't used symfony2, it's probably better than 1, incedently it borrowed its templating language from Django)
 
-God- said:
I'll have to check Django next, because Python's something I also find interesting.



I'm not even doing it in just my spare time. I wanna continue to learn it the moment I'm up. :)

Added to Skype.




Thanks, will check it out.



I will, thanks. I'm a hobby coder though, so liked the idea of learning something new, which is exciting, than expanding on something I already know.
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Just published my first gem after a little convincing from Darrin/Lee/Mattseh - hopefully it'll help you when/if you start doing content stuff (TheBestSpinner bare-bone integration, and nested spintax eval) here

Hope it helps brosef - hit me on Skype if you have any Q's <3
 
-god- said:
I will, thanks. I'm a hobby coder though, so liked the idea of learning something new, which is exciting, than expanding on something I already know.
Click to expand...

Check out "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks". You'd like it.

Bofu2U said:
Just published my first gem after a little convincing from Darrin/Lee/Mattseh - hopefully it'll help you when/if you start doing content stuff (TheBestSpinner bare-bone integration, and nested spintax eval) here

Hope it helps brosef - hit me on Skype if you have any Q's <3
Click to expand...

Nice Gem. I f'ing love the gem system - it's like CPAN minus the heartache.
 
Any language is only as strong as it's programmer. Granted there are limitations of every language, sometimes the limitation of the language is the fact that it is interpreted. Other times, it might be a lack of support in an area that you are hoping to work with. I personally like Ruby, just as much as I do PHP. I think they are both excellent languages. My newest temptation as far as interpreted languages goes is the Node Library for Javascript. It might be something to look into if you are still unsure of what language to pick up.
 
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