Ruby on Rails
Sounds like a sweet treasure, doesn't it? In reality Ruby is a server side scripting language akin to PHP, python, and perl. However, it is designed around minimizing the amount of actual programming that you have to do and from what I can see that is true. Ruby is intimidating, especially to someone like myself that is just now learning more about it. Considering that I am bombarded with terminology like Ruby, Gems, Rails, Mongrel and more of the same, I'd say that I'm not alone in being intimidated.
However, Ruby on Rails (RoR) is probably going to be what powers the next generation of web applications, at least in my opinion. Much the same way that PHP dominates today, I believe that the web 2.0 philosophy of cleaner, user friendly applications will spur more people to use RoR. We'll see, but I'm on my way over to RoR as we speak, although I have a LOT to learn. If nothing else, I wanted to post about it because it is something that developers should be aware of and should be learning early.
From what I can tell, the RoR framework does a lot of the configuration for you. For example, it will create all the files needed for an application, leaving you to edit them. It will also figure out database connections, columns, and queries without any configuration. Of course, you need to define what happens in the application, but it looks like all the tedious "web design" stuff has been removed. Using a VERY flexible template system it looks like there is no end to what designers can get done visually. And to top it all off, there are libraries for JavaScript functionality such as validating data and even AJAX functionality. In English, this means that creating a fully functional, interactive AJAX form is reduced to a few lines of code in Ruby on Rails.
In fact, I watched a video tutorial on their site where a gentleman created a blog engine in 58 lines of code (15 minutes). In another one, they created a search form where a user could enter tags and then search Flickr for images with those tags assigned. Completely AJAX powered, the images are presented in an animated box all without the page reloading. And this one was less than ten lines of code.
As I said, I don't really know anything about Ruby on Rails other than I am going to learn more. However, I have a feeling that once I have a handle on the language (much like I do with PHP now) I will be really glad that I took the time to learn it. Of course, that takes a year or so for me (at least it did with PHP) so I'm sure a lot will change by then.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: ruby, rails, php.
