So I tried to finish up my WPF app and I have done it up to a level where I can use it regularly. I just don’t feel like I need to put it out there right now and get inundated with bugs I have yet to find. Also got distracted by the awesome Ruby on Rails. Yes I am working with ANOTHER programming language. I personally blame Aston University for insisting we use so many languages making it hard to focus on just one. I walked out of that place with Ada95, Java, PHP, LISP, C++, SQL and some other crap I’m forgetting - it’s all on my CV anyway. So I know something good when I see it and Rails is definitely it.
Trying Rails was born of my frustration with Struts at work more than anything. Trying to find entries in colossal XML files and maintaining them is quite a chore. Add to that the database specific SQL that needs to be written at certain levels and sometimes I wonder if Struts is actually doing anything useful for me.
Rails is great because it uses conventions for filenames and actions rather than massive XML files - we stick to a naming convention, why shouldn’t the framework know what to do with the code you write? There’s also no database specifc SQL, you just write your Ruby code and it hooks into whatever database you have be it Oracle, MySQL or even Derby.
Don’t get me started on the way code can be hugely minimalised and the wonderful selection of pre-written standard procedures that can be plugged in anywhere. Rails is fantastic, it’s just such a shame that in the UK it’s only being used by a relatively (to Java) small number of developers in London only.
![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
Yeah, the stuff we do at work looks pretty archaic when compared with some of today’s frameworks, but you have to realise that the application was born many years ago before all this RoR-type stuff took off. Also, struts is just an MVC framework. It was never intended to handle the funky database abstraction stuff that’s possible today.
On another note, have you tried CakePHP? It’s kinda like a Ruby for PHP (or so I hear. I haven’t actually tried much Ruby yet myself).
Yeh I looked into CakePHP. From what I have seen it’s PHP’s answer to ROR, but why have the imitation when you can use the real thing aye