Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

11 comments

  1. surje

    seems to have a high hype ratio, but much of the excitement seems founded in some interesting aspects. it’s sort of a scripting / functional language hybrid, and i found it quite a leap to get there from where i’m at (C++). but i didn’t actually try writing anything, just went to a seminar on the topic.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Having played with it briefly its now seeming like the sort of thing I had always thought OO should be good at but nobody had bothered doing with it.

      Now just gotta learn Ruby.

      Reply
    • neilh

      Scary. But for me its not a career choice as such, I’m potentially parachuting into a project that is already written on Rails and plugging in something to populate the database behind it. I need to understand it enough to write the data but hopefully nothing more.

      Reply
  3. dmh

    Massively hyped. I believe the online Rails community dwarfs the regular Ruby community. There are comparable frameworks for Perl, Python, etc. that just haven’t caught peoples imagination in the same way. Just recently Sun decided they liked it; they’re supporting JRuby development at the moment.

    Reply
    • neilh

      That was pretty much my impression. I was hoping someone was actually doing something useful with it and I could buy them a coffee in exchange for all their wisdom. Once again the world doesn’t work the way I’d hoped.

      Reply
  4. darthstoo

    Never actually used it for a full site build but did play around with it a bit for some R&D time. From what I remember:

    Simple to set up and get running with,
    Separate code from templates,
    Creates database schema for you (not sure on DB but MySQL I would think, possibly others),
    No config – everything has to go in set directories, set DB tables following strict naming conventions – I think the directory structure is created for you as well.

    There were some handy scripts for generating a new site from scratch – DB schema, directory structure etc. but also new classes (I’m pretty sure it has an OO base but I can’t remember that much about Ruby as a language) with templates and DB insert, delete and update statements. It shortcuts a lot of the stuff you do repetitively when building a website.

    Oh and it seems to have its own religious following!

    Reply
  5. crispygoth

    I’ve spent a bit of time playing with it. Ruby itself seems like a very nice language to use – a bit like a properly OO version of Perl. As for Rails, it’s an interesting framework which provides a lot of the stuff for free that we would otherwise spend days writing in some other languages. For example, the database entity objects read the schema from the database to work out what attributes they should provide. The most basic of db objects consists of two lines of code – you define a class that inherits from the ActiveRecord::Base, and it works out the table name from the class name.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.