Exploring Ruby on Rails
So I’ve read all of the hype of Ruby and Ruby on Rails and while I am generally not a fan of code generation frameworks, I thought I would go ahead and take a shot at it to see if it is all it is supposed to be.
I read through a few tutorials a couple weeks ago and walked through Curt Hibbs’ article on ONLamp.com. Those were fine, but for me to really get a grasp of any tool I need something that I can relate to and something that I need to build for whatever reason. Well, it turns out that my wife has started tracking what food she eats, how much calories she takes in, how much water she drinks each day, etc. in a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet? That just won’t do for a developer!
So with a few requirements in hand I started building my first RoR application. I have the ONLamp article in one browser tab, my app in another, and I’m going to town on this application.
So far I have almost 3 hours into it including a little refresher reading. My model consists of four classes (for the moment) and only a couple of custom list pages so it isn’t anywhere near being usable just yet. So how did I spend my 2 1/2 to 3 hours? A good 30-45 minutes of that was actually watching TV, another 10-15 minutes was looking at how my wife wanted to use the spreadsheet. A couple minutes installing the console plugin for JEdit, a couple minutes going to OpenOffice.org to download that so I can open up her spreadsheet and a few more minutes of just goofing off.
All told, I have about an hour and a half to almost 2 hours of ‘work’ on this thing. My impressions so far? Not too shabby. Could I have done this quicker in Java? With what I have so done so far, perhaps. However, a couple of things come to mind:
- It is really nice is that I can change the DB schema and see it immediately reflected in the default scaffold view
- I like that RoR will build a date entry field for me. Might change it later though
- No gets and sets!
- Lines of code? Not counting the HTML (which honestly I copied and pasted from the ONLamp article then modified), I actually wrote about a dozen. The scaffold lines and a few list methods.
- I have not set up any relationships in the model yet
- I believe that once I start getting more into the app, the curve of Java to RoR will change quite a bit
I’m reserving judgment until I get further into the functionality (where most frameworks like this break down) but so far it is looking good.
Next step? I’m going to start creating more custom pages and tying the model together. Until next time…
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[...] As my previous post mentioned, I’m exploring Ruby on Rails as well for another simple project. After thinking about it, one thing came to mind. Ruby starts with the data model and goes up. Grails seems to go the other way around. The docs weren’t even clear as to if I need to specify an ID field or not(?). I know you can hand map Grails however. [...]