Monday September 27, 2004
A few days ago I cam across Rails by an accident. Rails is a framework for developing web applications, both the framework is written, as well ass the application code you write is in Ruby.
As a framework I haven’t found anything that compares to Rails when it comes to the speed of which you develop new web applications in, it is simply so smooth and fun to work with that it’s just silly. Really, it is!
Rails is made mainly of two parts; ActionPack and ActiveRecord. The first handles most of the client end (not on the browser, but more like creating markup and such) stuff, whereas ActiveRecord handles the database. The beauty is that classes based on ActiveRecord are “automagically” coupled to the tables in the database by name, which means that you table is essentially an object which is much easier to work with than crazy SQL statements.
The fact that it’s written any Ruby doesn’t really make much difference to me personally even though I’ve never written a line of Ruby before, it’s a quite simple and fun language so anyone with decent perl/python/php experience should be able to pick it up rather quick.
The fact is, that I’ve only been working with it for a little under two days, yet I’ve already converted 85% of a web application written in PHP (which took somewhere around 1.5 weeks from scratch).
I think I might even be tempted to say that Rails has made web development both fun and productive again for me! Take a look for yourself with the “Seeing is believing” video.
Oh yeah, and BaseCamp was written with Rails.