Anyone with Ruby/Rails experience?

Another posting at WSP (I forget where) lead me to the 27signals.com article called "Getting Real". I really liked what they had to say about website development so I went out and bought the Ruby book and Agile web development with Rails.

For some reason I find them a really good fit with how I had been thinking about website development.

However, I have been know to get carried away with new technology, so I am wondering if someone farther into the development process would care to comment. Does the website development process Ruby and Rails are supposed to support work as suggested?

My interest is with small sites that would benefit from advanced functions and rapid deployment. I am not concerned about server loads and/or speed for a large site.

Thanks,

never even heard of it and i am a programmer. What is it and why do i want it?

I found a link at WSP and followed it here

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

I bought the book and thought it was great. I plan to try and bring up some sites with functionality I had not previously considered based on this.

Take a look at their basecamp, campfire and other applications and see what you think.

RoR is nice and all, but there are a few downsides to it, like not being able to find a proper web host and the fact that you'll have to learn a new language (Ruby).

If you want fast development, RoR isn't the only choice. For example, PHP has many frameworks these days which allow for fast development, and are pretty much up to par with RoR.

the examples all require registering to see what they do, and that im so not doing. Somebody give me a 3 sentence run down on what is so amazing about Ruby And Rails. Sounds like Kings might be able to do that... whats the deal?

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Originally Posted by Emancipator

the examples all require registering to see what they do, and that im so not doing. Somebody give me a 3 sentence run down on what is so amazing about Ruby And Rails. Sounds like Kings might be able to do that... whats the deal?

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If you need to register and don't want to...try www.bugmenot.com.

Maybe you'll find a username/pass combo that someone has already used.

I have now spent more time wading through the flame wars on various forums and have a better feel for some of this. At this point it looks like:

Ruby is a programming language. No doubt it has pros and cons compared to other languages. No doubt the really important differences are very subtile and hard for a novice to appreciate.

Rails is a potentially helpful framework that will make website development much easier, IF your projects match the design structure it supports.

37Signals "Getting Real" ebook presents a philosophy of website design that you may or may not find accurate and/or appropriate.

I read the book first and thought it formalized many concepts I had struggled towards for years. Really exciting stuff.

Since the authors use Ruby and developed Rails it was natural to look to them to get the ball rolling. For whatever reason, web developement with PHP has never quite fallen into place for me. I found the Rails book extremely helpful in pulling together concepts that had not worked for me before. That suggests that for me this would be a good route to follow.

My son, who is already an excellent PHP programmer, has no interest in the Ruby?Rails stuff but used the "Getting Real" ideas to hack out a PHP prototype application yesterday afternoon. The key was reducing the functionality down to the absolute minimum and not worrying about rough edges.

Which leads to my last point; This simplicity stuff is deceptively difficult. His little app is hard to take seriously; it seems way to simple; it doesn't seem "Real". However, it replaces a procedure that is currently done with paper and pencil or a dot matrix printer, so how good does it have to be :)

very neat looking. Looks very much like xmlhttp / ajax. Which is VERY easy to use if your a php programmer.

it looks interesting to me as well. sp has it's own blog and forum for it now.

i wont be rushing over to use it when i can do just as nice stuff using xmlhttp and php.

After reading this thread I got the 37signals e-book "Getting Real" and then got into some tutorials on Ruby On Rails. The concepts 37signals base their development on are very refreshing and I can really see myself taking a lot of it onboard in the future. Can't recommend it enough.

I've been toying with getting more deeply into PHP recently after doing most of my web dev in the past on ASP but now I've seen how easy it is to get up and running with Ruby On Rails I might just get into it instead.

The most mind numbing tasks i.e. CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) are made almost instantaneous and with RoR's in-built support for XMLHTTP it's a very comprehensive package with an easy introduction but a lot to go on and learn.

I think I've found my new language and framework.