The past few days I’ve been having a play with Ruby on Rails. After all the praise on the web for it, i thought it was about time I gave it a try.
Most languages and frameworks require you to have a server, either as a stand-alone or running on your desktop system, to test the code. Rails comes complete with it’s own server, Webrick allowing you change and test code very quickly, The shipped version of Ruby on OS X 10.4 is unfortunately broken; you need to compile it yourself using the Xcode Tools (a free download from Apple) and these instructions. The instructions tell you to install Lighhttpd and fastCGI, but I just used Webrick, as it seems to involve a lot less fiddling around when I don’t need a fully blown server on my Macbook. Thankfully OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’ is going to come with Rails already installed.
When I actually got down to doing some code, it was pretty easy to pick up. Compared to the time it takes to prototype and build a blog app or similar in PHP, it took about 15 minutes in Rails, and that’s with no previous Rails nor Ruby Experience! It’s very impressive how Rails matched your database with your business objectts, and I look forward to trying to build some more complex web apps using it.
Tags
Ruby on rails, Php, Os x tiger, Os x leopard, Macbook, Webrick.
Related Posts
- Acts_As_Indexed now on GitHub
- JQuery on Rails
- Mod_Rails aka Passenger Migration and Review
- Scotland On Rails 2008 - Day Two
- Scotland On Rails 2008 - Day One
