Ruby On Rails, And I Take A Dive!

article by Srirangan

A website that I visit pretty regularly, Sitepoint.com, today published an excellent introduction for Ruby On Rails (ROR). I, like many of the webdevelopers, have been terribly curious about this almost "magical, no fuss" web development language, hence the time was perfect for Sitepoint to come out with the article.

Danny's article on Sitepoint gave a brief introduction, but moreso stressed and emphasized on the "ease of development" that ROR brings along.

We've witnessed years of almost three decades of "hero worshipping" OOP techniques in software programming, and for a brief period with the onset of PHP5, we've witnessed the same in the web programming sector. Now with the introduction of ROR, this can only increase .. increase exponentially. =)

And it is a good thing, this OOP, it is good!

Now as my interest in ROR has surely surfaced, I visit Wikipedia to see what they have to say about this new magical utopian web programming langauge. And I must say the blokes at Wikipedia have done an excellent job maintaining the entry for ROR. It is definitely a must read for anybody even remotely interested.

But what really caught my eye was the Philosophy Of Ruby On Rails. It adhere's to the DRY principly, Dry - Don't Repeat Yourself. Something I yearned for in PHP/Perl/ASP/Coldfusion, but like nirvana never could find it. If ROR can ever so remotely make DRY a practical principle, I will be the first to leave all and start 'practicing the ROR religion'.

Another defining principle of ROR is - Convention Over Configuration. Which Wikipedia graciously explains as, and I quote:
>
> "Convention Over Configuration" means that the programmer
> only needs to define configuration which is unconventional.
>
> For example, if there is a Post class in model, the corresponding
> table in the database is posts, but if the table is unconventional
> (e.g. blogposts), it must be specified manually (set_table_name
> "blogposts").
>

Eh, sounds not too bad for a lazy inefficient web developer like myself, does it .. ;-)

As I get all excited about ROR, I've finally decided to try it out on my little localhost tonight. Taking the plunge, metaphorically. I do hope ROR does live up to all this hype that its surrounded by and I've indulged in.

As this article ends, I'll leave you with some useful links:

The Wikipedia Entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails
ROR Project Homepage - http://www.rubyonrails.org/
Ruby On Rails - Programmer Assist - http://programmerassist.com/topic/105