Four Days On Rails

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There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, an article in OnLAMP.com claimed that “you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework...” The article then went on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working ‘scaffold’ application with virtually no coding. 

While this is impressive, ‘real’ web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. ‘Real’ applications aren’t as simple as that. What’s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build ‘real’ applications? 

This is where life gets a little tricky. Rails is well documented on-line – in fact, possibly too well documented for beginners, with over 30,000 words of on-line documentation in the format of a reference manual. What’s missing is a roadmap (railmap?) pointing to the key pages that you need to know to get up and running in Rails development. 

This document sets out to fill that gap. It assumes you’ve got Ruby and Rails up on a PC (if you haven’t got this far, go back and follow Curt’s article). This takes you to the end of ‘Day 1 on Rails’. ‘Day 2 on Rails’ starts getting behind the smoke and mirrors. It takes you through the ‘scaffold’ code. New features are highlighted in bold, explained in the text, and followed by a reference to either Rails or Ruby documentation where you can learn more. 

‘Day 3 on Rails’ takes the scaffold and starts to build something recognisable as a ‘real’ application. All the time, you are building up your tool box of Rails goodies. Most important of all, you should also be feeling comfortable with the on-line documentation so you can continue your explorations by yourself. ‘Day 4 on Rails’ adds in another table and deals with some of the complexities of maintaining relational integrity. 

At the end, you’ll have a working application, enough tools to get you started, and the knowledge of where to look for more help. 

Ten times faster? after four days on Rails, judge for yourself!  

Free Study Notes on Ruby

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Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book

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Ruby is an open-source, multi-paradigm, interpreted programming language (a bit of a mouthful I know! I'm going to explain it, I promise!). Ruby was created by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, a very fine Japanese gentleman who currently resides in Shimane Prefecture, Japan; Matz's work on the language was started on February 24, 1993 (commonly considered the birthday of the language; I hear that over in Japan they roll out a two-story cake and sing) and released to the public in 1995. Ruby is often hailed as one the most expressive and concise languages available to developers today. In that spirit of expressiveness, let's look at exactly what it all means. Let us now eviscerate these verbal furbelows with conviction! 

Open Source 
The official implementation of the language is free software distributed under the GPL and the Ruby open source license. If you're unaware of what "open source" means, then look at it this way: Matz programmed the entire Ruby interpreter and library, then gave away the code he used to do it. Since the source code is available, people can now take it and improve it. Many people take the code, improve it, and Matz (and his crack team of maintainers) integrate their changes back into the main source code. The benefit of open source is chiefly that you get a lot more minds working on a project than a proprietary project (and typically for free to boot!). 

Multi-Paradigm 
Like to write code in a functional style a la Haskell or Scheme? That's cool; Ruby does that. Really dig object orientation like Java or Smalltalk? No problem; Ruby handles that, too. Prefer to use a procedural (a.k.a. imperative) style like Forth or Ada? Ruby can "get its procedure on" as good as any other language! Don't know what any of those mean but just really want to program? Excellent! Ruby is a multi-paradigm language because it doesn't constrain to a single programming mindset; you can use any of the aforementioned programming paradigms with no problems in Ruby. You can pick the one you prefer (or the easiest for you to learn) and go with it: Ruby doesn't mind. Unlike some other languages, it doesn't get jealous and give you "errors" if you break it off with objects and decide to go steady with closures instead. 

Interpreted 
If you've used something like Assembly, Pascal, Fortran, or C/C++, you've used a compiled language. "Compiled" means that you've had to run your code through a little compiler and it spits out some sort of native code that will run without any sort of interpretation by the computer other than by the operating system itself. This can become time consuming as your project grows larger and larger, and sometimes can even be a severe hindrance to productivity. Oh, but there is another way! Ruby is an interpreted language, which means that there is an interpreter that reads your code and then emits native code to the operating system.