I am sitting down with a big glass of Ruby on Rails kool aid. When CEP was in active development I had several make comparisons to Ruby on Rails in comments on this blog. I have looked a RoR several times before, but something is different today. Maybe it is their extensive documentation, maybe it is RoR's alignment with my own goals when developing web applications, or maybe it is something else.
Cory and I watched a couple of Rails videos on the plasma screen in the conference room after lunch today. They would have been better with some audio, but I don't think I have seen another open source project with videos so they get credit for that.
Ok, time to go find some answers to some questions.
Update: I am pretty surprised how fast you can get up and running with Rails. Most of it has to do with the code generation though. The code generation makes it easy, but the code generation is only good when you first get going. Make any changes to the schema or upgrade Rails and you are going to be editing all of that generated code by hand (summed up excellently here).
It also seems like there is a little too much going on in the view, but that is just a gut feeling.
Ruby on Rails does not strike me a revolutionary as I have heard others say. I can develop just as fast with PHP, but then again, CEP has been compared to Ruby on Rails a few times. I do like Ruby because it is an "everything is an object" OO language. Yet, as Cory pointed out, it feels very procedural.
We have an app at work that we have written in Java (Tapestry/Hibernate) and then re-written in Perl. I am going to finish writing the same app with Ruby on Rails to give it a fair shot. (anyone wanna guess what language we will write it in next?)
I am very impressed with the Rails team and think they have done a great job of documenting and explaining how it works. I look forward to using some of the features I haven't used yet like their Web Services controllers.
One thing is for sure, the more you work with varied tools, the more you can see the advantages and limitations of each tool.
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