Ruby on Rails

I have been tinkering with this and I wondered what other developers thought of it?

 

Still not taken the time to play with it but still planning to! Going to set up a server at home soon to get some more hands on experience with Linux - was thinking of trying RoR then.

How do you like it so far?

 

I am a PHP developer primarily and have to say that I never thought anything could make life easier, until I found RoR.

Instead of creating long and exhaustive controllers in PHP, RoR does it for you from the command line. You simply edit it to your liking.

I am happy with my experience so far and I feel I shall be using it for years to come, along with AJAX for PHP.

 

I've heard a lot of positive things about it as well - I'll be checking it out sometime soon.

 

I'm a PHP developer too and once saw an article that compared typical PHP with RoR code for an application like a recipe database. I was amazed by the code reduction myself.

Then again, you can find a lot of PHP functions and classes ready made FOSS but still, RoR seemed promising.

 

The recipe database you speak of was my starting point with RoR. I used that tutorial to begin with and I have to say it was very effective.

 

as far as I can tell, RoR is like ASP.Net for PHP, but all from command line
am I wrong?

 

Myself, A PHP programmer for 6 years, now a much happier Ruby on Rails programmer.

For new people to RoR the most imporntant thing to learn is Ruby. Rails is written in Ruby, and when you write Rails code, you are writing Ruby code.

You can compare PHP to Ruby, but Ruby on Rails is a framwork on top of Ruby, like Symphony is to PHP. So compare Ruby to PHP, and Symphony to Ruby on Rails.

There is a rails command line but is only used for certian tasks.
It just generates some skeleton code and for you when you want a new Model or Controller etc, and for installing plugins, tests etc. But for the most part you program in an editor.

 

The thing I find with php is that 90% of the time you don't need to write your own scripts. Search google for what you want to do and most of the time there is a nice script already written that you can just drop into place.

Also for things like login scripts, affiliate management, user management etc php is great. I have a standard set of scripts that I can use on any site just by adding some includes to the top of each page. Upload the scripts to a folder and you have a ready made system.

Once you have got into the swing of building sites from the ground up using templates and common includes with php you can make great sites quickly that are really easy to edit.

 

Agreed, get comfortable with a few open source scripts, such as joomla and wordpress, and you can have flexible sites with plugins up and running in no time at all

 

I keep meaning to set time aside for ROR but have yet to do so- I'd be interested to hear how long it took people with no ruby experience to get their first 'real' site working (or how long it took to feel comfortable with the environment).