When would you use ruby on rails

hargi · 1 Aug 2011 at 07:57

Just a quick one as I been going through my book shelf and found a book i bought a few years back. When Ruby was thought to be the next big thing but it looks like thats not the case.

Reading through the numerous what language should i learn threads the answer nearly always is choose a problem then pic the best language to solve that problem.

Most problems can be solved by most languages but obviously some are a better fit than others.

So where does Ruby fit on to this, when would you us it?

TIA

Muel · 1 Aug 2011 at 08:26

ROR is growing, not declining. You can use it to very quickly build things that would take ages in PHP. It's very "elegant" for want of a better word, and very easy to use once you get the hang of it.

Personally, I really enjoyed playing around with it as an exercise, but I've never been brave enough to use it in anger.

hargi · 1 Aug 2011 at 19:56

What you done with it Muel?

Muel · 1 Aug 2011 at 21:23

Almost nothing, just attended a few sessions in another class at uni (heard the tutor was doing Rails, so I snuck in.

).

I've done a bit of Ruby as well at work, have to say I find once you get going, it's a very quick tool to use. Takes a while to get your head round it though. (MVCs and other such stuff I'd never encountered before).

Xelene · 2 Aug 2011 at 20:34

Muel said:
ROR is growing, not declining. You can use it to very quickly build things that would take ages in PHP.

That's not entirely a fair comparison. Ruby on Rails is a language (Ruby) built on a web application framework (Rails). There are equivalents in other languages, for instance Python and Django or PHP and Doctrine.

In terms of languages, i'd say Python is the one gaining acceptance within the marketplace. Ruby is nice, but seems to be going nowhere. PHP is widely accepted and understood, but is a bunch of ****.

Muel · 2 Aug 2011 at 20:51

sldsmkd said:
PHP is widely accepted and understood, but is a bunch of ****.

Now that I agree with.

ROR seems to be growing to me! Just in terms of online chatter, people I know and stuff.

sniffy · 2 Aug 2011 at 22:40

What do you guys not like about PHP?

slylittlefox · 2 Aug 2011 at 23:03

Muel said:
ROR seems to be growing to me! Just in terms of online chatter, people I know and stuff.

Definitely seems stale to me - I remember when it was first released and there was a big hoo-har about it, a couple of startups were using it to great effect in their online apps - but it's been a fair old while since I've seen or heard of it.

sniffy said:
What do you guys not like about PHP?

The stuff they don't know how to implement properly

NathanE · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:23

ROR seems to be almost exclusively used by hip and cool startups whose product consists of a SaaS web application.

Nothing wrong with that. But try to do more complex stuff with it than just basic "new media" and you'll hit road blocks very very fast.

It's called Ruby *on Rails* for a very good reason.

Vtec9k · 3 Aug 2011 at 16:34

I've been teaching myself RoR recently and I'm finding it really powerful. If I was building any sort of twitter/blog/cms/ecomerce type system from scratch then it'd be my choice.

However the big problem I have is when you try to do something that's not "the rails way". Like when I was trying to build a frontend to an existing (badly structured!) DB which I gave up on and coded in PHP.

sniffy · 3 Aug 2011 at 17:42

I need to get a feel for RoR by the looks of it. Any recommendations for tutorials/overview?

Beansprout · 3 Aug 2011 at 18:16

Personally I'd use it if I was high and thought it was trippy

RoR is simply a framework over a language, much like the hundreds of PHP frameworks. But people compare RoR to PHP :/

PermaBanned · 3 Aug 2011 at 18:52

Vtec9k said:
I've been teaching myself RoR recently and I'm finding it really powerful. If I was building any sort of twitter/blog/cms/ecomerce type system from scratch then it'd be my choice.

However the big problem I have is when you try to do something that's not "the rails way". Like when I was trying to build a frontend to an existing (badly structured!) DB which I gave up on and coded in PHP.

Iirc, Diaspora is written in RoR.

Xelene · 5 Aug 2011 at 17:06

sniffy said:
What do you guys not like about PHP?

it's a bunch of patches on top of a bunch of patches on top of a bunch of patches on top of someone visitor page application.

If I was to pick just one thing, i'd say it's the loose typing - it promotes bugs. Any language that needs two different equality operators is badly designed.

I never got why PHP became commonplace server side and not say Javascript.

sniffy · 5 Aug 2011 at 21:00

sldsmkd said:
If I was to pick just one thing, i'd say it's the loose typing - it promotes bugs.

As much as I like PHP (not sure why exactly!) I totally agree with this. However you can specify valid parameter types for methods so I've started encapsulating any kind of logic that could introduce bugs (basically anything besides the most simple logic) into classes with appropriate mutator/accessor methods. It's not ideal and certainly has its limits but it does nonetheless reduce the chance of introducing bugs.