Soup of the Day

Running on Rails

This week I am going to finish my first session of learning French professionally. For the past ten weeks I have been taking lessons to improve my pretty basic French, with the aim of finally being able to communicate with my fellow countrymen for longer than two-seconds.

So as one language goes out the door, I thought it was time to learn another over the summer while on recess. But what to learn? Well I have chosen to learn Ruby on Rails because I have been hearing so much about it. PHP is a very nice language and I have been using it for over three years now. Here at Polaris Digital it is the defacto language of choice as we spit at ASP and have no reason to use Perl or Java.

So why Ruby on Rails, or RoR as it has come to be known? Well, I have been hearing so much about it recently and after talking to a few PHP developers at @media 07 who had used it, all I heard was good things. RoR is a framework, or scaffold or templating system for dynamic web sites. It works on the Model-Viewer-Controller (MVC) concept for programming which was first touted in the late 1970’s.

But what really makes RoR very agile is that fact that it is Dry, or Don’t Repeat Yourself. You only ever have to code methods and classes once, the system does the rest in terms of linking. Just to see how fast it is, I watched a demo on the Ruby on Rails web site that demonstrated making the first part of a basic blog in under ten minutes. Yes, I’ll repeat that; under ten minutes. This impressed me so much that I brought a book (Agile Web Development With Rails) and have started teaching myself the language.

At the end of my tutoring, I am going to rewrite this blog using RoR and say good bye to WordPress - albeit personally. More on WordPress later this week though.

I’ll keep you all posted of my progress.