Ryan Campbell

Ruby on Rails

Ok I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails lately and thought it was a fun toy but wanted to put it to the test of building a real application. So far I have to say I am very impressed. For such a new technology there is a huge community around it which is extremely helpful. By itself, Ruby on Rails is a great framework to get a simple web application up and running quickly. I must admit though that the documentation is a bit lacking. The API docs have repeatly required me to google for answers. Also the wiki adds more confusion than help because of all the contracticting comments on the pages.

One major plus is how well plugins/extensions play with RoR. My favorite so far is FileColumn, which couldn’t compliment RoR any better. With only a couple lines of code I can have photos being uploaded, resized and displayed within my application. The only complaint I had was quickly solved by using ActAsPartitionedId with FileColumn, which I do hope is bundled with FileColumn in the future.

This is also my first experience with Ruby. At first glance the syntax looks a little odd but coming from a perl background, it grew on me quickly. I think this language has a lot of potential and I hope its user base keeps growing.