JaeWeb

ruby

December 23rd, 2006

Because of a project I am planning with a friend of mine, I have been spending a little bit of time studying Ruby on Rails in more detail. So far, I’m quite impressed. Ruby on Rails is a scripting language similar to PHP or ASP, but it also handles a lot more behind the scenes than any of those languages do. With only very few lines of code you can set up a page to list items in a database, edit them, delete them, etc. By just creating a table in a database and one command you can tell the system to create the scaffolding of an entire application. You of course end up rewriting most of the scaffolding to customize the page to your requirements, but it makes it incredibly easy to test parts of the site, since all is working at least in a preliminary sense within no-time. It’s like a scripting language on top of a game engine - the whole engine for the website is there, you just need to script the particular use you want to make of it.

I’m reading The Pragmatic Programmers - Agile Web Development with Rails now, which shows how to develop a basic shopping cart application, while demonstrating all kinds of good programming practice: separating layout from code; testing habits; etc. Really quite nice and quick to read. After this, I should be able to develop a website using Ruby on Rails in no-time.

Entry Filed under: programming languages, programming, ruby, web development