I’ve always been a bit… pessimistic about Rails and Rails apps. But of course, I am a CodeIgniter boy so that is where my true loyalties lye. But things change. Especially after founding FourthTimeLucky, I’ve been thinking about experimenting as much as possible. You know, it might be interesting to see what Django is like, for example.
When I bought a small, cheap and not very powerful VPS today, I thought “hell, why not?” and proceeded to gem install rails.
One word I can say to you. Wow.
I finally get what all the press have been talking about. Rails has received so much attention over the past few years, and, by hell it deserves it.
Installation was really easy. I decided to use Lighttpd instead of Apache, and it was only a matter of calling a few bash commands and editing one configuration file. Then I was officially rolling on Ruby on Rails.
Ruby being a brand new language to me, it took me a while to rediscover all the features and datatypes that seem second nature to me in PHP. But once I had read a few tutorials and played around in the ruby shell, it became easy.
The one, main thing about Rails and it’s principles is that they work. It worked, the way you could leave a terminal open while coding and chuck in a small command, which generates all the files you need, saving loads of time. It works, creating a pluralised database table in relation to your model. It works, putting a question mark at the end of a method name, and it returning TRUE or FALSE (bool) automatically. There is no need for messing around with connections, weird variable names and stupid “necessities” of a system. It saves time.
And the key here is time. I built a full blown authorisation system in a matter of minutes. Rails does nearly all the work for you. But the interesting thing is - it doesnt feel intrucive. It feels kinda nice.
But it’s not just Rails. The Ruby language itself is amazing. It’s such a beautiful language, when you write a script and look back, it’s like art. All the techy bits work well too; arrays, pointers, objects. You get so used to the fact that everything is an object. It doesnt seem different at all, but it makes the world of difference.
I love CodeIgniter, but I don’t love PHP. And now I’m falling for Ruby, and for Rails. It’s just stunning.
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