Ruby on Rails rox0r

[ai42]

So I've decided to make myself more marketable and force myself to learn Ruby on Rails for this school project.

Anyway I've done PHP for a couple of years and Ruby on Rails rocks. The part of the project I did yesterday probably would have taken me 500-600 lines of code and taken me 2-3 days and I did it in like 150-200 lines and in about 6 hours, and I probably could have done it quicker but I am still kinda learning the language.

 

[George P Burdell]

Agreed. I'm trying to find the time to learn more of it.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Have heard good things about it. Sounds like the next big thing in web design.

 

[kalster]

what about ajax? how does that compare to ruby on rails, php, i dont know much about web dev stuff

 

[mugs]

I'm in the process of learning it... very early stages. Seems pretty cool so far.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: kalster
what about ajax? how does that compare to ruby on rails, php, i dont know much about web dev stuff

AJAX can be combined with RoR or PHP.

 

[ai42]

I haven't done AJAX devlopment but I've been reading up and there are lots of AJAX plugins that are super easy to integrate into RoR.

 

[OdiN]

WTF is RoR??

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: OdiN
WTF is RoR??

Ruby on Rails

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: kalster
what about ajax? how does that compare to ruby on rails, php, i dont know much about web dev stuff

AJAX can be combined with RoR or PHP.

Do you know if SonataWeb.net offers RoR?

I believe my WebKore.net resellers account offers RoR :thumbsup:

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: RossMAN

Originally posted by: mugs

Originally posted by: kalster
what about ajax? how does that compare to ruby on rails, php, i dont know much about web dev stuff

AJAX can be combined with RoR or PHP.

Do you know if SonataWeb.net offers RoR?

I believe my WebKore.net resellers account offers RoR :thumbsup:

Yup, one of the domains I'm hosting for a friend uses it.

 

[ai42]

Since RoR is just plugins into Apache there are TON of cheap affordable hosts who already support it.

linky of RoR hosts

 

[OdiN]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Originally posted by: OdiN
WTF is RoR??

Ruby on Rails

Kinda cool..watched their little weblog video. The guy is insane who is talking but hey.

 

[ai42]

Originally posted by: OdiN

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Originally posted by: OdiN
WTF is RoR??

Ruby on Rails

Kinda cool..watched their little weblog video. The guy is insane who is talking but hey.

Yea I hate that video. It took me over an hour to analyze that video. He does several things very quickly and doesn't explain it so if you try to replicate it it takes quite some time. There is a cookbook example for Windows platform linked on the RoR main page somewhere that is a really good tool for actually learning the language. I actually bought a Mac Mini to do devlopment work for this 🙂

 

[OdiN]

Originally posted by: ai42

Originally posted by: OdiN

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Originally posted by: OdiN
WTF is RoR??

Ruby on Rails

Kinda cool..watched their little weblog video. The guy is insane who is talking but hey.

Yea I hate that video. It took me over an hour to analyze that video. He does several things very quickly and doesn't explain it so if you try to replicate it it takes quite some time. There is a cookbook example for Windows platform linked on the RoR main page somewhere that is a really good tool for actually learning the language. I actually bought a Mac Mini to do devlopment work for this 🙂

I don't know that I would ever need it for my webpages. My content is usually mostly static.

The only thing I have been looking into is a photo gallery that actually works how I want it to. I have a JavaScript version that does the fades..but it isn't perfect and has issues with different browsers.

I will probably just end up doing a flash gallery in an iframe on my site and that will be that. But I don't know enough flash to design a gallery. In the process of figuring that all out now - never used flash before.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: ai42
Since RoR is just plugins into Apache there are TON of cheap affordable hosts who already support it.

linky of RoR hosts

The main issue is with security, since it requires shell access which many hosts don't like to give out.

Sonata Web requires a scanned copy of your driver's license before they give you shell access, and they claim they monitor your bash history every night to make sure you're not snooping around in other people's files.

 

[AmigaMan]

I don't know about RoR, it seems a little too amatuerish right now. I don't mean that in a bad way, but I haven't seen any real enterprise applications developed with it. I've heard bad things about the Apache plugin for it and lighttpd isn't that mature yet. I'm sure it's fine for 90% of the smaller websites out there, but how does it handle huge workloads? Can you even cluster it? Could it handle Anandtech's forums? I'm not sure I'd bet my future on it yet, but I would LOVE to be proven wrong in this since I'm itching to take a look at it.

 

[ai42]

Originally posted by: AmigaMan
I don't know about RoR, it seems a little too amatuerish right now. I don't mean that in a bad way, but I haven't seen any real enterprise applications developed with it. I've heard bad things about the Apache plugin for it and lighttpd isn't that mature yet. I'm sure it's fine for 90% of the smaller websites out there, but how does it handle huge workloads? Can you even cluster it? Could it handle Anandtech's forums? I'm not sure I'd bet my future on it yet, but I would LOVE to be proven wrong in this since I'm itching to take a look at it.

Check out 37signals.com they are totally comitted to RoR and Basecamp I know gets pretty huge traffic load. I don't know about clustering but I'm sure it is very possible to scale a RoR site quite a bit.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: AmigaMan
I don't know about RoR, it seems a little too amatuerish right now. I don't mean that in a bad way, but I haven't seen any real enterprise applications developed with it. I've heard bad things about the Apache plugin for it and lighttpd isn't that mature yet. I'm sure it's fine for 90% of the smaller websites out there, but how does it handle huge workloads? Can you even cluster it? Could it handle Anandtech's forums? I'm not sure I'd bet my future on it yet, but I would LOVE to be proven wrong in this since I'm itching to take a look at it.

Haven't heard good things about the Apache plugin myself. I use Apache + FastCGI. Look at basecamp, backpack, tadalist, et al from 37signals.com - all enterprise level.

Could it take Anandtech's load. Not in it's current state. On a large scale, Rails wouldn't hold up as well as older scripting solutions.

The plus points, from what little I've learnt about it are:
1. Increased produtivity. You think up the architecture (preferably in MVC) and let Rails deal with the gruntwork.
2. Easy version control. Using rails with subversion is well-documented and encouraged.
3. Somewhat built-in ajax support, if you're into ajax.
4. Built-in support for extensive testing.

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Originally posted by: AmigaMan
I don't know about RoR, it seems a little too amatuerish right now. I don't mean that in a bad way, but I haven't seen any real enterprise applications developed with it. I've heard bad things about the Apache plugin for it and lighttpd isn't that mature yet. I'm sure it's fine for 90% of the smaller websites out there, but how does it handle huge workloads? Can you even cluster it? Could it handle Anandtech's forums? I'm not sure I'd bet my future on it yet, but I would LOVE to be proven wrong in this since I'm itching to take a look at it.

Haven't heard good things about the Apache plugin myself. I use Apache + FastCGI. Look at basecamp, backpack, tadalist, et al from 37signals.com - all enterprise level.

Could it take Anandtech's load. Not in it's current state. On a large scale, Rails wouldn't hold up as well as older scripting solutions.

The plus points, from what little I've learnt about it are:
1. Increased produtivity. You think up the architecture (preferably in MVC) and let Rails deal with the gruntwork.
2. Easy version control. Using rails with subversion is well-documented and encouraged.
3. Somewhat built-in ajax support, if you're into ajax.
4. Built-in support for extensive testing.

I don't consider the 37signals stuff enterprise in it's workload handling. While I'm sure it's stable and works well, what happens if you get popular and start seeing AT or Amazon or ebay like traffic?
As to your points:
1. I agree that from what I've seen and played with, the productivity is higher than Java in similar use cases.
2. I use subversion with all of my java projects at home and at work. Source control really has no bearing when talking about a language.
3. I can do Ajax using the multitudes of opensource packages out there with Java.
4. There are several unit-testing frameworks available for Java. However since I don't know about RoR's testing methodology, it's hard for me to know if Java's are more mature than RoR's.

 

[fs5]

RoR just revved to 1.0 about a year ago I believe. The most complex application out there is BaseCamp. However the site that receives the most traffic is PennyArcade. I believe they're fully RoR now, but that is a simple CMS software. BaseCamp has the complexity of a reall appliaction.

If you're learning RoR to become more 'marketable' as the op said, which companies are hiring RoR developers? I'm willing to guess there are 100x PHP developer positions than RoR positions.

If you spent time learning and developing PHP it would land you a job much faster than if you spent it learning RoR. Not to mention transitioning form PHP to RoR would be simple.

RoR is a powerful language, but in the real world not many companies use it. For prototyping it is absolutely the best, but I would not bet all my chips on it.