Comments on: Ruby (on Rails)

By: Chris Patterson

Chris Patterson — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:48:04 +0000

Okay, so I’m going with the flow. I read through the skateboard book last night and worked through the store example. I find that it’s a pretty good read actually. And there are certainly a lot of supposed things that are handled by the Rails framework. It seems to just work, and clarity is a good bonus. Since it’s using convention over configuration, everyone trained to build Rails applications adheres to that convention (well, I’m sure there are strays).

The ability with which many of the “2.0″ features are applied, AJAX, etc. make me so envious of people who started using Rails long ago. These things are so easy in Rails, using Partials and such to easy the updating of areas on the page. Could the Microsoft MVC framework be learning more from Rails than I thought originally?

I’m still trying to figure out how to qualify statements about Ruby in general that I’ve heard at various ALT.NET meetings:

* Dependency Injection isn’t an issue in Ruby

Okay, that’s only one. But I’m also still trying to see how you would do such a thing and allow different classes to handle an implementation at runtime. Is it all base classes or are there interfaces as well?

By: Mike McClenaghan

Mike McClenaghan — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:22:04 +0000

For your first shot with Rails, try to just “go with the flow”. There’s a lot of processes from the “Alt.Net” world that just aren’t needed as much in Rails. Said another way, don’t get caught up in premature optimization.

By: Ben Scheirman

Ben Scheirman — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:51:29 +0000

The “Skateboard” book is great… Agile Web Development with Rails.

Also, you should check out Why’s Poignant (?) Guide to Ruby. It’s hilarious even if you don’t want to learn ruby. Plus that guy (Why) wrote a pretty good html parsing library called Hpricot, so if you ever have to do any screen scraping of web pages, check that out.

Keep in mind that a lot of changes have been made since most of these articles and books were written, so you may notice some quirks here and there.