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Ruby on Rails

Ruby on RailsI was at a Ruby on Rails presentation last night, run by the Oxfordshire branch of the BCS. I was expecting great things, to be told how all our .NET and Java web apps were to be made obsolete overnight (or something like that).

Unfortunately, it wasn't all that it seemed cracked up to be. It looks lovely for bashing out quick sites, especially if you are designing the data model from scratch (and it's quite simple). However, as you try and do more complex things, then it gets exponentially harder. I think it was summed up by someone I was chatting to after the event, who said that Ruby on Rails is great as it's "Convention not Configuration" and once you learn the "Rules", then you can develop sites very quickly.

I don't know about you, but once I'm told that I have to work within rules, then that implies potential limitations. I don't want to hear what it can't do, I want to hear what it can do!

Apparently the next release forthcoming will perform better. Maybe this is a first step to making this snazzy technology ready for the Enterprise?


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posted @ Friday, April 27, 2007 10:54 AM | in Techie

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# re: Ruby on Rails
Posted by Chris
on 6/20/2007 3:29 PM
Hi Dan,

I can confirm the feeling you got when hearing of rules. But as you already stated "convention over configuration" and this is perfectly realized with rails.

E.g: If you want standard behaviour - perfect. You have much less to do compared to other frameworks because of the convention. Nothing needs to be configured, nothing need s to be overidden.

But of course you a free to go a completely diffent way, ignoring conventions. Then you have to tell your contollers to act different than then standard convention.
With any other programming framework (especially the Java/J2EE stuff) there is a lot of configuration needed in order to get the simplest things running . Do you know what I mean?

This is the difference
The rails framework has a lot of assumptions (you call it rules) what the developer will do next and in my opinion these assumptions reflect 50-80% of the thing the developer really needs to do.

Give it a try and you will smile ;-)

Chris

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