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by John Wilger.
Original Post: Weblog: Decided to Get on the Train by John Wilger
Feed Title: ThatWebThing
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Feed Description: Articles and weblog about design, usability and programming for the web.
If you haven't heard of [Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org) or [Rails](http://www.rubyonrails.org) before, I highly recommend checking out both of them. Ruby is a programming language that actually makes the end-to-end development of a system _fun_, and Rails is a superbly designed framework for developing web applications with Ruby.
I only have one complaint about Ruby---there is no way to distribute compiled Ruby code. In order to distribute a program written in Ruby, you _have_ to give away the source code. This may inhibit its adoption in creating commercial applications. In fact, it was because of this fact that I stopped development on a least one project that I had started using Rails to implement. Instead, I decided to try to mimick the functionality of Rails using PHP5. Let's just say that endeavor isn't going so well.
It's not that it would be _impossible_ to reimpliment much (although not all) of Rails' functionality in PHP; it's just a real burden to do so. Ruby and PHP---even with the improved Object Oriented features of PHP5---follow abjectly dissonant paradigms. _Ruby just makes most programming tasks easier._
So I'm back to using Rails. Even for the application I stopped development on earlier. I decided that I'd rather give up the ability to distribute the code---relying instead on an ASP delivery model---than have to give up using Rails for its development. Yes, _Rails is *that good.*_
This also means that I'm going to be implementing this site with Rails, too. You might not see any changes here for a little while, because I'm getting the basics running on a development server. However, I think that overall progress here will be much faster using Rails than with the current PHP scripts.
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