Diving into Ruby on Rails

February 6, 2008 by ryan

This past weekend I started really digging into Ruby on Rails.  For a while now, I have known a little bit of ruby (by reading Why's Poignant Guide and messing around a little with Rails), however, I wanted to have a much stronger understanding in it -- even if it's only for the concepts. 

 
Why Rails -- Why Now?

Rails has been publicly available since July 2004; some may ask why I am just now becoming interested in the framework. There are actually several main reasons...

1. It is a good educational resource in the MVC Pattern. This applies to many implementations such as Microsoft MVC, Symfony and Cake on PHP and a whole slew of other frameworks.
2. Rails is becoming a more viable option with JRuby and the forthcoming releases of IronRuby.
3. The concept of DB Migrations is very nice -- especially when you have encountered the difficulty involved in placing your database under source control.

 

Setting up the environment

1. I needed to configure my computer to run the rails apps. NetBeans seemed like a good idea to me because of the simple JRuby integration (other options Aptana Studio, Eclipse, your favorite text editor w/ Instant rails). 
2. I already had MySql installed on my computer so there was no need to set up a database server (Sqlite was a tempting option as well).
3. Created a series of databases (as needed) for the various test rails apps to write to.
4. Downloaded and installed MySqlYog Community edition. I knew I was going to be handling most of my database stuff with the Rails ActiveRecord implementation and db migrations BUT I still wanted to see what was going on inside the db.

 

Initial Impressions

After the initial hour or so of setting up my environment, I wrote some quick test applications (following some tutorials, at first obviously). I really liked the principle of Convention over Configuration.  This was apparent in many areas of the framework such as the generator / rake tools and the easy application configuration in the .yaml files. I can see how this may not be the best choice for certain applications but for a lot of web applications, it seems like it will be a good fit.

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