Archive for the ‘ruby on rails’ Category
Just Ruby and friends links
Ruby links courtesy of my Ruby evangelist workmate (PS: please give him a job if you have one)
http://rubyonrails.com.au/ (Australian group)
http://railscasts.com/ (video tutorials)
http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en (Google Group)
http://toolmantim.com/ (Tim Lucas Rails developer blog ex cf)
http://drnicwilliams.com (Phd, Ruby on Rails expert)
http://www.workingwithrails.com/ (Like the white pages of Ruby on Rails Development)
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/camping/ (Alternative Ruby on Rails)
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/
RoR’s failure?
I think this is the first ever blog post that “sort of” says that Ruby on Rails isn’t working. Well, you won’t come across this kind of post often so I just link it here for future reference:
7 reasons I switched back to PHP.
Point 2, I guess is the biggest hurdle for my company to adopt RoR, we have a lot of Coldfusion applications to support and I can’t imagine having to support both Coldfusion and RoR projects. And it is fair to say that all developers in the company are quite junior in Coldfusion. So why add another burden of learning RoR when your Coldfusion still suck (so to say)..
Point 6, while I can understand writing repetitive CRUD in SQL is just plain boring and unnecessary sometimes, but to let a framework does all the SQL for you.. well I am not prepared for that sort of thing yet. Besides good developers NEED to know how to write good and efficient SQL anyway. And yes I love write complex SQL queries, I like optimizing them, I like to ponder the trade offs between IN and EXISTS etc2. However there is a place for ORM (Object Relational Mapper) for simple CRUD and I guess this is where RoR is quite good. I am quite interested in investigating these ORM frameworks for Coldfusion.
Point 7, I have heard this been said couple of times, I guess one can only benefit from learning different programming languages or frameworks. Once I am comfortable with my Coldfusion (and Java) skill, I’d probably give RoR a go and improve my programming skills.
The great debate
Ok maybe it’s not that great.. Some people at work are quite enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails (RoR). I do not have interest nor time to investigate it further, but the concept is quite promising. Having MVC, ORM and all of other goodies out of the box is great.
Is it a language worth learning for me personally? I am not convinced yet, RoR hasn’t really that well adopted as being the mainstream web language (yet). I checked Seek today and here are the results (location is set to Sydney):
- Keyword: Ruby, 27 positions
- Keyword: Coldfusion, 76 positions. (wow, last time I checked there were about 20-ish positions)
- Keyword: Java, 1662 positions.
- Keyword: .NET, 1515 positions.
- Keyword: PHP, 272 positions.
Would interested to run this search again in few years from now, things might change. Adding Ruby to my knowledge portfolio using share market terms is like buying small cap shares, risky but have a lot of potential, while delving in Java/.NET is like buying blue chip shares, stable but not that exciting..
