• Registered: 2012-11-21
  • Posts: 2

Topic: What is good about rails?

Hello,

I am thinking of starting to learn ruby on rails, and I have a few questions in advance. As far as I've read, ruby seems to be a little slower than some other frameworks, in terms of scaling and such, and I haven't noticed anything very special about it. What makes it so good and demanded nowadays?

Another thing is - what do you use for front-end, since ruby (correct me if I'm wrong) is server-side, does the good ol' javascript apply? Or there are better alternatives? I'm asking this because I've seen Opa language, and that default front-end-back-end support looked really cool.

  • jamesw
  • Administrator
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  • From: Leeds, UK
  • Registered: 2008-06-07
  • Posts: 2,701

Re: What is good about rails?

What is good about Rails is Ruby!
My Opinion
Ruby is pure OO and total dream to work with.
Rails is the Web Framework built on Ruby. You'll have quite a learning curve to understand the Rails conventions but you can develop professional web applications really fast.

The reason Rails is not as fast as other languages is that Ruby is interpreted not compiled, but then so is Java Script

As Rails is mature now there is a lot of support available and also a lot of resources.
Of course, Rails is Open Source

Check out Railscasts to see Ryan Bates coding various Rails solutions to see if it fits for you. http://railscasts.com/
start at the beginning and go through them al until you have an idea of what it's al about.

Choosing a language is very personal and you should make your own mind up by just trying it.

you are free to add in any other languages you wish, Rails makes it dead simple to use javascript and has jqueryui packaged up with it in the latest versions.

What you want and what you need are too often not the same thing!
When your head is hurting from trying to solve a problem, stop standing on it. When you are the right way up you will see the problem differently and you just might find the solution.
(Quote by me 15th July 2009)
  • Registered: 2012-03-25
  • Posts: 16

Re: What is good about rails?

Ruby is by far my personal favorite language its incredibly elegant and the speed differences between it and other scripting languages i.e. PHP, Python, Perl and Bash is fairly small. Whats more is these speed differences will differ depending on what your doing. If you test how quickly it will update 1000 strings one will be faster than the others however if you test how quickly it can parse a JSON object you might get completely different results. Also keep in mind good hardware is becoming cheap so you can run a fairly intense app on as little as $20 a month with any of these languages and move up as you need. So speed isn't really an issue. All of the scripting languages are at least in the same league as far as speed go.

Real speed in a web app comes from many factors, the network your server is on, your server hardware and configuration of the database and web server application to name a few. As far as your code goes real speed comes from many factors as well, how efficiently you hit your database, your design and archetecture etc...

As for your Javascrip question. Ruby on Rails can serve up any content, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, Some strange language you invent your self. The end result is just a response that some other application on the client side interprets. Its usually HTML with CSS and Javascript interpreted by a web browser but anything is technically possible. As far as client side languages Javascript is the one to use because every modern browser supports it. Their are helpful languages built on top of javascript like JQuery that make your life as a developer easier.

Opa is actually a web framework that uses javascript on the server and client side. It looks pretty cool I mean to look into it myself. You know how face book, gmail and many other sites update content without a page request. What they are actually doing is serving up javascript that updates content by making request to the server every so often. You can do this with rails fairly easily but it looks like Opa's goal is to make that even easier and have the server language be the same as the client language.

Hope that helps. I guess to surmise go were you feel comfortable and happy coding. Also like jamesw said Ryan Bates Rails casts is a great resource. If you end up going with ruby I would also recommend http://rubykoans.com/.

Last edited by tyger86 (2012-12-09 02:32:35)

  • From: Berkeley California
  • Registered: 2011-08-16
  • Posts: 66

Re: What is good about rails?

RoR is 1 character away from a bug.
It forces capitalization
It forces the removal of underscore from table names
It forces pluralization

For reasons I don't understand, I never see ruby code commented.