Hello RoR

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is the new framework I have been playing with and so far I should say it is really amazing. It has all these intuitive approaches that you find out by just guessing. I can only compare it with a couple of other technologies like RIFE (ogrence.net) and Grails (remotespots.com). RIFE has some neat features (template mechanism, web continuations, asynchronous mail queue, persistence layer, etc) but since the lead developer Geert Bevin stop actively developing it, it takes its place in the graveyard of dead tech. Then I try something different, Grails, which is a Groovy version of RoR. It is really good especially after Java Enterprise, convention over configuration is an excellent approach! But it is kind of very young, also Grails has this really fast development cycles, in a couple of month, I had to update my applications two times in which I spend hours to overcome plug-in dependencies, deployment issues, etc. ( one more thing, I can not find any other cool projects that uses Grails, even at SF Bay Groovy and Grails Meetup Group , actually I was the only one who is currently using Grails  )

Since finding a good starter document is a very important decision, I took my time to select my first RoR source. I went over the following books and decided to use the latter one:

• Ruby on Rails For Dummies
• Sitepoint Simply Rails 2nd Edition
• Beginning Ruby on Rails
• The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book

Although it is called as a tutorial, when you get the pdf dump, the 12 chapter tutorial is approximately 500 pages, which is literally a book.

The language of the book is very clean and most of the time funny. You can easily develop the code when you are reading it.  You can also follow a test driven approach if you want, but you don’t have (I didn’t).

I finished the book in 7 days with a daily 4 hours concentrated reading/coding sessions and with lots of Starbucks Misto (thanks Starbucks Besevler crew!).

The final code is at Github, and live demo site at Heroku.

As a pointer for the further steps, the tutorial suggest some pointers but I prefer to go on with my path, which requires ImageMagick and Paperclip, so next post will be about these two.

See you next time!

ps. I really like Heroku. Grails has something similar but to be honest, it is not that magical (as in iPad).