Robert on Rails
Friday, June 23rd, 2006Today I started learning “Ruby on Rails”, the framework that was originally built by the people at 37signals, who wrote some of the web applications that were soon adopted under the umbrella known as “Web 2.0″.
I hope it lives up the hype. I’ve tried working with frameworks before, and found them too strict to use in the real world. A colleague of mine once structured a project we were working on around a complex MVC (Model, View, Controller) framework that baffles me even to this day. I just couldn’t see how the pieces go together, and I ended up hating frameworks altogether.
Worst still, every HTML form element was generated automagically by some mystery form builder. The only way to get it to generate nice, clean XHTML-compliant code (with proper end tags and lowercase attributes), was to hack the hell out of it.
But anyway, back to Rails. I’ve never used Ruby before, but it seems pretty straightforward. I’m hoping that learning the framework at the same time as learning the language will help be structure my code better, as I tend to code chaotically. Hopefully some structure will do me some good!
Well, I’ve now compiled and installed Ruby and Rails onto my MacBook, and have a copy of “Agile Web Development with Rails” sat next to me - so, wish me luck! I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on my progress.