Archive for July, 2007

Posted: 27th July 2007
Tags: .Net, dotnet, Ruby on Rails
Posted in Ruby on Rails
Comments: No Comments »

My blog entries have been a little infrequent of late as I have had my nose deep in the excellent Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) (Pragmatic Programmers) and also the fantastic Ruby on Rails Essential Training (Lynda.com).

For those of you that don’t know Ruby is a dynamic open source language created by Yukihiro “matz†Matsumoto in 1995. Rails is an open source framework created by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004 to support the development of 37 Signals suite of web applications (Basecamp, Packpack etc.)

So two months later what have I learnt ..Well enough to be a competent rails coder, but more importantly, I feel the the process has been nothing more than an awakening to a new approach in Software Development. I have to admit when I first heard about Ruby on Rails I was skeptical and it was easy to state through away comments such as rails is slow, it’s not scalable, it’s difficult to deploy, you can do the same thing on .Net blah blah blah. And to some extent these are all true, but back to that in a bit.

So have I given up on .Net well no, of course not, however there is a time and place for .Net just as there is a time and place for Ruby on Rails. Before I spent time with Rails I easily got caught up in the .Net vs Java vs PHP arguments but at the end of the day all these languages have their place and software development is an art that is transferable to any language. I really can\’92t understand why some people are so defensive about the programming languages they use, I have programmed Basic, Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C#, Java, PHP, Javascript etc in my past however Rails is different but not to the extent that it makes any skills I have learnt obsolete, it just teaches an approach that I can take back with me and use with any other language I use and made me a better software developer.

And this is why I am so excited about Rails, I have been programming since the age of 6 (24 years) and discovering Ruby on Rails has been like rediscovering programming again for the first time. It is taking a disciplined approach to development which then allows a flexibility and freedom to really allow creativity.

As I said earlier I was not convinced with Rails at first so I set myself a challenge. I had a personal project that I had been working on for just over a month, using .Net and Subsonic. So if in one month I could not only learn Ruby on Rails but get to the same point in a RoR version of my project I would be convinced.

Did I achieve this. Of course I did or I wouldn’t be raving about it now. I picked Ruby up enough to get started in two weeks (evenings and weekends) and it took me two weeks to get to the same point I had done with the .Net equivalent, not only that I had produced a better product as I had not had to implement workarounds for various technical barriers I had previously had with .Net.

So of these bad points well yes Rails is slower than compiled languages but it can still handle huge amounts of traffic, Basecamp is a good example. Hosting for Rails is patchy especially in the UK, there are one or two hosts but my advice is to have a form of dedicated or virtual host which you can configure with Apache, Mongrel (Ruby on Rails Application Server). As for scalability, there is no problem at all as sessions can be stored in a database or using Memcache and it uses mysql on the backend.

So the upshot is I really recommend all developers, not just .Net to look at Ruby on Rails. Like me I hope you will discover a flexible web framework which not only makes your life easier but more enjoyable and rewarding, but it might just make you a better developer.

For more information:

Ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org
http://www.rubyonrails.org

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