ruby on rails

[ericnkatz]

So, anyone have experience developing on rails? I am going through the tutorials and documentation playing around. But wanted to know if anyone had any cool projects they've been working on or completed using RoR, or if they had additional resources to help out with starting up, from development to deployment - that kind of stuff.

Thanks!

[sbauer]

  On 29/06/2011 at 15:09, ericnkatz said:

So, anyone have experience developing on rails? I am going through the tutorials and documentation playing around. But wanted to know if anyone had any cool projects they've been working on or completed using RoR, or if they had additional resources to help out with starting up, from development to deployment - that kind of stuff.

Thanks!

I use Rails for all of my personal websites. While I haven't done anything different with it, there are many sites out there that are powered by Rails (github.com, yellowpages.com, groupon, hulu). I'm not sure why you want to see something cool others have developed, but it's a web application framework and, like all web application frameworks, it is used to streamline the application development process. While showing you cool websites proves that other people are using it to create great sites, the difference between Rails and every other framework is in the code and how it accomplishes tasks. That's when you'll start to notice how Rails is different.

A few resources:

- http://www.railscasts.com

- http://www.peepcode.com

- http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

If you like books:

- Rails Tutorial (ebook is available on the site I linked above. You can also get the real book in a store)

- Agile Web Dev with Ruby on Rails (Make sure you buy the newest edition)

- Rails 3 Way (New people thought the book was too advanced for them. Read the reviews on this one. I liked it, but I'm also an experienced Rails developer)

For deployment, I would recommend Apache w/ Passenger (mod_rails) OR Nginx w/ Passenger (mod_rails). You have to use some *nix-based OS for the server. There are many tutorials out there on best practices. Linking to them here would be quite a job.

For development:

- What OS are you using? Some *nix (Unix, Linux, OS X) OS is preferred. While you will be able to develop apps on Windows, you'll notice that it's not the best dev platform for Rails. The performance isn't very good and some gems (Ruby libraries) are dependent on *nix.

- If you're using *nix, download and use RVM to download/install Ruby. (https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/) If you're using Windows, use Ruby Installer (http://rubyinstaller.org/). Make sure you download and install the development kit (http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/) as well. Sometimes gems have to compile a native library. If you don't install the dev kit, you will have trouble installing these gems.

[ericnkatz]

  On 29/06/2011 at 15:44, sbauer said:

I use Rails for all of my personal websites. While I haven't done anything different with it, there are many sites out there that are powered by Rails (github.com, yellowpages.com, groupon, hulu). I'm not sure why you want to see something cool others have developed, but it's a web application framework and, like all web application frameworks, it is used to streamline the application development process. While showing you cool websites proves that other people are using it to create great sites, the difference between Rails and every other framework is in the code and how it accomplishes tasks. That's when you'll start to notice how Rails is different.

A few resources:

- http://www.railscasts.com

- http://www.peepcode.com

- http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

If you like books:

- Rails Tutorial (ebook is available on the site I linked above. You can also get the real book in a store)

- Agile Web Dev with Ruby on Rails (Make sure you buy the newest edition)

- Rails 3 Way (New people thought the book was too advanced for them. Read the reviews on this one. I liked it, but I'm also an experienced Rails developer)

For deployment, I would recommend Apache w/ Passenger (mod_rails) OR Nginx w/ Passenger (mod_rails). You have to use some *nix-based OS for the server. There are many tutorials out there on best practices. Linking to them here would be quite a job.

For development:

- What OS are you using? Some *nix (Unix, Linux, OS X) OS is preferred. While you will be able to develop apps on Windows, you'll notice that it's not the best dev platform for Rails. The performance isn't very good and some gems (Ruby libraries) are dependent on *nix.

- If you're using *nix, download and use RVM to download/install Ruby. (https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/) If you're using Windows, use Ruby Installer (http://rubyinstaller.org/). Make sure you download and install the development kit (http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/) as well. Sometimes gems have to compile a native library. If you don't install the dev kit, you will have trouble installing these gems.

Currently using OSX I have it installed and running on localhost:3000 going through the http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ tutorials right now. Guess I haven't looked at deployment yet since I don't really have an app worth deploying anywhere for now. I think I may definitely look at the real books once I get more comfortable and go through some of these other tutorial sites you shared.

Thank you!

[articuno1au]

Sorry to tag onto this..

What's the advantage of developing with RoR as opposed to say ASPX.net?

I've never really had anyone explain why they use it over ASP/PHP et all.. Just curious >.<

[sbauer]

  On 30/06/2011 at 17:24, ericnkatz said:

Currently using OSX I have it installed and running on localhost:3000 going through the http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ tutorials right now. Guess I haven't looked at deployment yet since I don't really have an app worth deploying anywhere for now. I think I may definitely look at the real books once I get more comfortable and go through some of these other tutorial sites you shared.

Thank you!

If you don't want to use the built-in server (maybe to test deployment or you'd rather just use apache to dev), install Passenger and then install Passenger Pane (https://github.com/Fingertips/passengerpane). It will add an item to system preferences that will let you easily add sites to the apache installation. It's pretty easy to use. It just creates vhosts in the background so it's not magic or anything, but it very easy to use when you're developing.

A lot of developers use some kind of open source tool for command-line deployments. I've used capistrano in the past. There are other ones out there though.

[sbauer]

  On 30/06/2011 at 17:27, articuno1au said:

Sorry to tag onto this..

What's the advantage of developing with RoR as opposed to say ASPX.net?

I've never really had anyone explain why they use it over ASP/PHP et all.. Just curious >.<

There's a rather large difference between the two, especially if you're talking about ASP.NET WebForms (standard ASP.NET) and RoR. RoR follows the MVC pattern, while WebForms tries to recreate Windows development for the web (controls, event life cycle). If you like control over your HTML, and don't mind being exposed to what the web is, then ASP.NET WebForms would be a terrible choice. ASP.NET WebForms and RoR are so fart apart that they're not even comparable.

ASP.NET MVC is another framework created by Microsoft that puts an MVC architecture over the ASP.NET pipeline. While it uses a similar pattern, the two frameworks are still quite different. When you create an ASP.NET MVC project, you will see a few folders, a couple config files, and a layout. That's all. How you configure business logic, data access, and the routing is up to you. If you want to use an ORM, you will need to set that up. MVC ships with jquery, jquery validations, Microsoft Ajax, and that's pretty much it.

RoR, on the other hand, is very opinionated. It expects you to use the framework in a way that it was designed for. While this sounds bad, it's actually a good thing. Following its conventions will make your life very easy. There's no boiler plate code needed to setup a data layer since it comes with an ORM. Models are expected to go in the Model folder and routes, for the most part, can be standardized. You also don't have to think about how you're going to manage schema changes as ActiveRecord migrations does it for you. As a result, setup time is not usually a big deal.

Use ASP.NET over Rails if...

- You need to use Microsoft tools.

- You need to use a Windows server.

- You're comfortable with Microsoft and/or their developer tools.

- You can't use open source technologies.

Use ASP.NET WebForms over MVC if..

- If you want to add rich data features with little to no work.

- You don't care about the maintainability of your application.

- You like headaches.

Use ASP.NET MVC over WebForms if...

- You don't like the event driven approach of WebForms

- You want 100% control over your markup.

- You want to practice TDD (Test Driven Development)

- You want to use the MVC architecture.

Use RoR over ASP.NET if..

- You don't want to/can't use a Windows server.

- You don't use Windows at all.

- You like the Ruby scripting language more than C#/VB.NET.

- You would rather use a dynamic language, instead of a static language.

- You like the conventions that Rails enforces.

- You prefer open source technology.