PhP, RoR, Flex 3

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am evaluating on moving to rails for our main development platform.

I would love to hear your experiences(good or bad)

Thanks Guys.

Giovanni

2

Hey, something I can reply to!

About a year ago, I put forth a lot of effort to learn PHP. I was able to build a testing website (www.esenapaj.com), however, in doing so, felt that my code wasn't built upon a solid foundation. Whenever I wanted to add a new feature, it felt like I had to hack my application. Change one thing, something else stopped working, fix it, another item wouldn't work correctly, etc. Granted, I was programming in procedural style, using no frameworks, or the ideology of the model view controller.

This last summer, I've put a lot of effort into learning Ruby on Rails. Don't believe all the, "it's easy to learn" comments - it's not. Rails is a beast - a good beast, though a beast non-the-less. It's built upon Ruby, which is not a C styled programming language. If you wish to learn Rails, start by reading a Ruby book, it'll help you a lot.

Even though I can do more with PHP compared to my current Rails knowledge, I believe I've made the right choice to make the change. I really enjoy working with rails. Good luck!

~Achithyn

3

Hi there.

Not too long started working with RoR so I'm not the most experienced one out there by far. Here are my 2 cents, though:

Rails simplifies A LOT working with databases. I agree with Achithy. Rails is a BEAST. Ruby is very powerful. Ruby feels very weird at first if you are very familiar with other languages. Take a very good look at blocks and iterators. There is way more to learn than with regular PHP (not an expert on that either, though) to know how to use the framework well.

I think that the more the database is involved in the project the better off you're using RoR.

Pepe

4

Thanks guys,

I do agree its been quite something to setup. But I think I got a hold
of things. No thanks to the resources available out there.

I do know the value of a good framework and rails is one of the best
frameworks. Hope to speed up and learn to tame the beast.

Thanks again.

Any thoughts on Flex 3?

5

Ruby + Rails + RubyAMF + Flash = Fun to work with!

Don't know how good Flex3 fits this, but this should be quite as much
fun as with Flash and RubyAMF. We used this for the RitterSport
website and it was very easy and intuitive to implement.

Cheers, Florian

P.S. I'm working on a Rack Middleware (http://rubyforge.org/projects/oii/ ) that transparently de- or encodes request / response so no extra
invocation of the controller logic is needed and would work with
frameworks like merb, waves, ... that have rack adapters. Any help/ ideas would be appreciated.

6

Ruby+Rails+Flex 3 work well together. I have a basic tutorial here:

http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Ruby-On-Rails-With-Flex

Best wishes Huw Collingbourne

SapphireSteel Software Ruby and Rails In Visual Studio http://www.sapphiresteel.com