43 Things

After many years of frustration developing PHP applications
I was looking for a web framework to invest my time in. As had given up building my own I loked at the many options in PHP.
I saw Rails and was impressed but was not so keen on learning yet another language. I tried cake code ignitor among others
and found them to be missing something important that I could not quite figure out. While attendting Apple’s WWDC 2006 in San Francisco, I saw some great demos with Rails, and saw Apple adding it to OS X Leopard. Later that day I found myself at Borders Books buying Agile Web Development with Rails.
I have now digested th 1st and 2nd editions as well as rails recipes and am now going through Programming Ruby.
I am now a total convert, Ruby and Rails have made me a better programmer and have allowed me to build vey effective web applications in a fraction of the time a PHP application would take. I recently joined a team of developers working on a code igniter project, and realised how painful PHP really is after working with Rails. This project has now come back to us with the client requesting migration to rails. I have inadvertantly
landed exactly where I want to thanks to Rails.
So this leads me to my goal of truely mastering Ruby on Rails a path I am already striding down with confidence and satisfaction.

Dec 05, 2006, 06:14PM PST | 4 cheers

Comments:

rjregenold

Rails

I’m reading that same book. After developing with .NET and J2EE, Rails is a breath of life. So simple yet so powerful.

Feb 08, 2007, 05:16PM PST | Respond to this 1 cheer

agileimp

And it just keeps getting better...

I have recently been working on some really cool projects. The bulk of work has been test driven (testing framework built in).
I have been lucky to be working remotely with an international team which has been fun and challenging. I can also recommend
another book Ruby for Rails, has quite a different approach. I am also working on some Ruby apps for windows that use Active Record outside rails, I will be writing some gui stuff for this app which will be fun also. Since you have done .Net stuff you may be intersted in
the Ruby.Net compiler which give you access to the .Net framework from Ruby.
Anyway best of luck once you reckon your competent with rails I can pass on your details to those I work with. All the best.
Steven (an agile imp )

Feb 09, 2007, 01:56AM PST | Thread | Respond to this

rjregenold

Thanks for the information. I’ll definitely check out the Ruby .NET compiler and that other book. I got to write a cool GUI for a graph problem in my class last semester. I used Java, then later re-wrote it in Python (which I liked much better). Are you developing your GUI in Ruby or something else ?

Feb 10, 2007, 02:27PM PST | Respond to this

Comments:

Rails

And it just keeps getting better...

The world wants to...