- Learning Rails – Day II
Well, I spent the second half of today (and >4 hours at Farmer Boys) working on my Whirlfood project in Rails and made a surprising amount of progress. Took some time to start to get used to the Rails methodology and the Ruby language syntax, but I think I’m in pretty good shape now.
Got to admit, I’m starting to like Rails for rapid development. After 2 days, I feel like I can build a simple web app almost as quickly as I can using C#. Which completely amazes me. Of course, there are lots of complex things and specialized functions that I still don’t know how to do in Rails, but still, I’m pretty stunned. In a good way.
- Learning Rails – Day I
I’ve been reading up a bit on Ruby and think I have a passable handle on the syntax. Also studied the structure of Rails apps. So now it’s time to actually build something to actually learn it. And because I have no patience for more Hello World examples, I’m going to build something actually useful.
Only problem is that I don’t have any tiny project ideas right now. So I’m going to re-work an existing idea and build a social restaurant recommendation site, based on my previous (poorly-named) Edahh project. If it turns out well, it might just be the basis for a re-launch of that service.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first:
$ rails whirlfood -d mysql
And the adventure begins.
- Why Ruby on Rails vs C#?
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately trying out a variety of development technologies and one of those is Ruby on Rails. I haven’t yet figured out exactly why people are so excited about it. Perhaps it’s because the convention-over-configuration methodology hides quite a bit of complexity from the developer. But my issue with it is simple – I like to be in control of my software and I like more explicit design.
