Web 2.x Blog

In desperate search for an alternative, I came across Ruby on Rail. The first time I heard of Ruby was in 2000 when a University PhD mate of mine told me he used it for statistical purposes. I never figured Ruby could be what it is today back then.

I decided to go for the “leap of faith” and gave Ruby a shot, and the famous “Create a web app in 1 line of code” actually happened!!!! I could imagine that one line of command line would require extensive setup on your server using a range of Java Frameworks like Hibernate, and if not, JDBC. Throw in a bit of Apache Struts and there you have an equivalent of the one-liner in Ruby!!!

ruby script/server generate controller MyController

The magic line above generated a model, view and controller file all at once. And what’s best, it works on the run!!!!! The syntax in the rhtml (view) file that’s generated looks like traditional PHP code embedding or JSPs. What amazes me is the intelligence that’s built into the core engine to use name matching to automatically find out your various components. Struts on the other hand, gives you more flexibility in allowing you to specify all your configurations in a XML file, but the downside of it is, you need to read up quite a fair bit and will take a while for a newbie to start get it up and running. It also takes heaps to maintain the xml configuration files. But for newbies to Ruby, I believe it will be more compelling !!!

So is Ruby on Rails the Holy Grail? Ruby certainly isn’t, but the Rails framework, man it is. Would like to see a simplified development model like this on Java, Java on Jrails anyone?

Check this out Java on Sails

Tags: Rails, Ruby