Pseudorandom

Rails: First Impressions

Due primarily to overwhelming peer pressure, I’m finally trying Ruby on Rails.  Overall, it’s living up to its reputation.  Rails makes it very easy and fast to get a web application off the ground and it gets the boring, repetitive code out of my way so that I can focus on the interesting parts of an application.   Ruby itself is a very nice language.  It lets me write powerful and concise code, a la Perl.  At the same time the code is attractive and readable, like Python.

Rails exhibits one of my favorite principles of system design: The right way to do things should also be the easy way.  Web developers should seperate presentation and logic, and with Rails that’s the easiest way to code an application.  You would have to do extra work to mix the two.  Developers should do unit and functional tests, and Rails includes tools to make it easy to do so.

While I recommend that any web developer should check out Ruby on Rails, I’d especially like to recommend that new or aspiring web developers give it a try.  The structure of Rails encourages and supports good development practices, so a new developer can learn them while learning Rails at the same time.  Those good coding habits will then carry over to other development environments when it becomes necessary to use them.