Feb 14
Some Ruby on Rails talk
As our customers already know, we are quite fond of Ruby and Rails. While it’s certainly something developers have explored, I’ve found that many people have heard the term, but not much more. We’ve been playing with the Rails framework since its inception and deploying it for a bit over a year now. Rails employs Ruby, an object oriented language out of Japan, that is over 10 years old. Ruby cherry picked features from several languages and I’ve heard them compared to Perl, Lisp and more.
The productivity gains are immediately obvious to anyone who has spent time using PHP or Java. But I think the most important features of Ruby on Rails are the modeling capabilities. Thanks to the object oriented Ruby and the ORM capabilities of Rails, real world problems and business logic are easy to outline. People can express a problem in understandable terms that translate directly to code. This provides a powerful starting point for writing a customized application that solves a specific task.
That being said, I recently found two interviews with the Rails author David Heinemeier Hansson. David is a passionate leader in the community and a gifted programmer with a clear vision for Rails. The first article is the shorter of the two and a good introduction to the history of Rails.
I’d actually almost advice people to cut their teeth in web-development on the mainstream offerings. Once you’ve tried developing a substantial application in Java or PHP or C# or whatever, the difference in Rails will be readily apparent. You gotta feel the hurt before you can appreciate the cure.
The second article is longer and more detailed:
Ruby attacks the productivity problem by making the core elements as expressive as possible, so the programmer doesn’t have to rely on IDEs and other tools on top of the language to get stuff done. Few programmers today would even consider doing Java without Eclipse/IDEA or C# without Visual Studio, but lots of programmers happily write Ruby code in good text editors that aren’t born with specialization for one particular language…
Let us know we can answer any questions you might have about Ruby or the Rails framework. We’re quite active in the community and love to spread the word.
Filed by matt under rubyonrails web