Ruby on Rails

I have been working on a web site for my son??s baseball club, Tri-Cities Baseball, with my wife Suzanne and our friend Steve Cousins, and it has been a lot of fun. Suzanne has been doing the graphical design and static pages, and Steve Cousins and I have been working on the registration part using Ruby on Rails (RoR).

It is always hard to learn a new language AND a new framework, but it is amazing how much we were able to accomplish in a short time starting at zero.

I also turned the Tri-Cities Baseball site into a RoR Wiki that uses the Textile markup language. Then, I used the same technique to turn this web site into a Wiki.

Ruby

Ruby by itself is a great object oriented language, that provides all the benefits of object orientation, without the downfalls of pure(object(languages(like(lisp)))). (That was a Lisp joke. ;-)

Rails

Rails is a framework that uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture and a Don??t Repeat Yourself (DRY) philosophy so your code is cleaner and easier to maintain. It also includes a object-relation mapping so that it is easy to store and retrieve stuff without having to write a bunch of low level SQL. It also handles sessions and uses a lot of conventions over configuration, which lets you get down to work rather than spending a lot of time setting stuff up.

RoR Applications

Another indication of how easy it is to develop applications in RoR is that even though it has only been around for about a year and a half, there are already an incredible amount of applications available using it, including blogs, wikis, bug tracking, project tracking, accounting, forums, picture galleries, and more. For comparison, Java has been around for over 10 years, and it still doesn??t have some of the applications available in RoR!

RoR Tutorial

Here is a Ruby on Rails tutorial I developed that might be helpful for people to get RoR installed and to write their first RoR applications, as well as for those that want to integrate Google Maps or Flickr into their RoR applications:

RoR Pages

Revised on January 23, 2007 14:19:12 by Max Dunn (69.226.225.131)