Reinforcements, please?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi there… I’m a Ruby Newbie, and I’m starting to delve into Ruby on Rails. Anyway, my dear mother (I’m 30 years old, by the way, you think I’d be old enough to decide which language I want to learn) for whatever reason is convinced that I should do PHP and not Rails. Quite frankly, I’m sure that PHP is great, and I use stuff that has PHP and I can hack it, but I want to learn RoR. (Again, 30 years old here.) :slight_smile:

In any case, my mother does a lot of SEO and has affiliate sites… she is convinced that Ruby can’t do that type of stuff and has challenged me to show her any dynamic sites done in Ruby on Rails, and any affiliate or eCommerce sites. As I’d quite rather spend my time learning RoR, as opposed to scouring the web for sites to justify my choices (again, 30 years old here!) :slight_smile: I was wondering if any of you RoR peeps would know of sites that I could use as proof. LOL. I can’t believe I’m even posting this request, but it’s in absolute desperation. :slight_smile:

THANKS so much.

2

Samantha wrote:

Hi there.. I'm a Ruby Newbie, and I'm starting to delve into Ruby on Rails. Anyway, my dear mother (I'm 30 years old, by the way, you think I'd be old enough to decide which language I want to learn) for whatever reason is convinced that I should do PHP and not Rails. Quite frankly, I'm sure that PHP is great, and I use stuff that has PHP and I can hack it, but I want to learn RoR. (Again, 30 years old here.) :slight_smile:

I'm older than you.

Show her this diagram:

http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/03/java-programmers-are-the-erotic-furries-of-programming/

http://tinyurl.com/jl26t

If Rails were on that "Programmer Hierarchy" chart, it would be above Ruby. (SPARKS, OCaml, and Fortran would be above, too, but for different reasons.)

In any case, my mother does a lot of SEO and has affiliate sites... she is convinced that Ruby can't do that type of stuff and has challenged me to show her any dynamic sites done in Ruby on Rails

Honey chile, I think we'd be hard-pressed to find a _static_ site done with Rails!

, and any affiliate or eCommerce sites. As I'd quite rather spend my time learning RoR, as opposed to scouring the web for sites to justify my choices (again, 30 years old here!) :slight_smile: I was wondering if any of you RoR peeps would know of sites that I could use as proof. LOL. I can't believe I'm even posting this request, but it's in absolute desperation. :slight_smile:

Any of us responders on this mailing list could write any one of the features your mother pointed to in less time than the fastest PHP programmer could.

Now Google for the thousands of blog entries by former PHP coders, with years of experience using and advocating PHP, who have discovered RoR and then blogged, "What was I THINKING???"

3

I'm older than you.

Heehee... :slight_smile:

Show her this diagram:

http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/03/java-programmers-are-the-erotic-fur…

http://tinyurl.com/jl26t

If Rails were on that "Programmer Hierarchy" chart, it would be above Ruby. (SPARKS, OCaml, and Fortran would be above, too, but for different reasons.)

I will do just that. From everything I've read and grasped, Ruby on Rails DOES dynamic sites.

Honey chile, I think we'd be hard-pressed to find a _static_ site done with Rails!

THANK you.

Any of us responders on this mailing list could write any one of the features your mother pointed to in less time than the fastest PHP programmer could.

And that's exactly why I came here. :slight_smile:

Now Google for the thousands of blog entries by former PHP coders, with years of experience using and advocating PHP, who have discovered RoR and then blogged, "What was I THINKING???"

Yup, I've seen that stuff, which is exactly why I figured that RoR is the more elegant and wise route to go.

Thanks, Philip! I appreciate it!!

4

RoR > PHP

A little info on SEO

And as far as eCommerce, here is a company lead by Steve Case (co- founder of AOL)

Your mother needs to drink the Ruby colored Kool-Aid

ps. I'm 36, and a recovering PHP user, thanks to Ruby

5

Samantha wrote:

SEO

/Pragmatic Ajax/ by Gehtland, Galbraith, & Almaer, has a very good segment about usability.

Seeking to prevent the coming wave of Ajax Abuse, the authors point out that a site must be bookmarkable.

Rails helps with exemplary support for "Pretty URIs". Not only can you write legible source code, like 'Order.has_many :line_items', you can also produce legible URIs, such as http://mysite.com/order/42 . If you bookmark that URI (and if the engineers made no mistakes), you can return to that bookmark easily.

Ajax provides the opportunity to break Pretty URIs, because you can dynamically drive a page into a state that can't be bookmarked. /Pragmatic Ajax/ recommends remembering bookmarking, and establishing usability guidelines for each site that expose relevant states for bookmarking. Google Maps, for example, has a "Link to this page" feature that stores a snapshot of any state.

Is your mother afraid that Ajax abuse will make pages un-book-markable, and hence hard to optimize in search engines? With one hand Rails giveth and with the other taketh away!

(If this wasn't, in fact, your mother's beef, don't explain it to her :wink:

6

Hi --

I'm older than you.

Heehee... :slight_smile:

Show her this diagram:

http://lukewelling.com/2006/08/03/java-programmers-are-the-erotic-fur…

http://tinyurl.com/jl26t

If Rails were on that "Programmer Hierarchy" chart, it would be above Ruby. (SPARKS, OCaml, and Fortran would be above, too, but for different reasons.)

I will do just that. From everything I've read and grasped, Ruby on Rails DOES dynamic sites.

Definitely. I'd put in a minor plea for ignoring the chart; it represents Ruby, implicitly but unequivocally, as a "web language", and generally credits Ruby programmers with, I don't know, some kind of superiority complex which is very far from anything I've observed in 6.25 years of Ruby programming. (I'm actually more worried about the persistent Ruby inferiority complex.) But anyway -- yes, dynamic, definitely! And Rails is a bunch of Ruby libraries, on top of which you write Ruby code; so Rails programmers are Ruby programmers, and Rails is dynamic too. I know that a static website could be served up by a dynamic language... but that's definitely not what happens in the typical case with Rails :slight_smile:

David

7

dblack wrote:

I will do just that. From everything I've read and grasped, Ruby on Rails DOES dynamic sites.

Definitely. I'd put in a minor plea for ignoring the chart; it represents Ruby, implicitly but unequivocally, as a "web language",

By making it a peer of C, and superior to C++?

Rails is dynamic too. I know that a static website could be served up by a dynamic language... but that's definitely not what happens in the typical case with Rails :slight_smile:

And if you need a static site, you use Rails, rather trivially, as a first-class content manager, and then you turn on page caching. Voila: A static site...

8

Taking a break from watching Lost...I don't think it's about 'Bookmarkability,' but more because 'PHP is the thing that's most known and most used.' My mom, used to program back in the day (read: COBOL, I spent my preschool years coloring on punchcards) and she got back into computing with web design sometime around '00, eventually progressing into SEO. I'm not quite sure of her logic, but she doesn't think that Rails can do what PHP does, as far as I can gather. "Show me one affiliate marketing site that is done in Ruby. In fact, show me one dynamic site that is done in Ruby." I went over to the RoR homepage, and sent her a few examples of "who's on ruby" and then ran off to watch TV.

Sorry for the brief post... Lost is back on. :slight_smile:

Samantha

9

Nobody is really answering your question.

If you aren't familiar with PHP or worse, web programming in general -- Rails wouldn't be my first recommendation to anyone.

There is too much magic, too much OOP, too many clever bits -- that it may end up hurting you when you try to push beyond the basics that you'll find in tutorials and ruby/rails books.

Also, if you are creating "clever hacks" to help your mother in SEO optimization -- PHP might be a better option. It can swoop in, allow you to tweak a page -- and be gone.

Rails is a huge framework and you can't easily squeeze into a 2-liner on your mom's site.

I program in both PHP and Ruby -- both have their place. Obviously, if you are committing time to learning -- you can't easily gulp down both. But the things that you learn in PHP will be useful when you move to Rails.

Ben

10

Nobody is really answering your question.

If you aren't familiar with PHP or worse, web programming in general -- Rails wouldn't be my first recommendation to anyone.

I am familiar with PHP, I am familiar with web design and programming logic. I've been studying Ruby for several months and will eventually go to Rails.

There is too much magic, too much OOP, too many clever bits -- that it may end up hurting you when you try to push beyond the basics that you'll find in tutorials and ruby/rails books.

I am comfortable with OOP. While I'm comfortable with procedural programming, I also grok OOP.

Also, if you are creating "clever hacks" to help your mother in SEO optimization -- PHP might be a better option. It can swoop in, allow you to tweak a page -- and be gone.

Nope, I'm not doing that. She wants me to do that, which I may eventually do, but when I say I can hack stuff, I can go through code, change things, and make it do what I want.

Rails is a huge framework and you can't easily squeeze into a 2-liner on your mom's site.

Right, I'm not wanting to do much on my mom's site(s). It is my goal to become a programmer, which I know takes time and effort. I'd just rather focus on Rails as opposed to PHP. Ruby excites me; PHP does not.

I program in both PHP and Ruby -- both have their place. Obviously, if you are committing time to learning -- you can't easily gulp down both. But the things that you learn in PHP will be useful when you move to Rails.

Ben

Thanks for your input, Ben!

Sorry to be brief... coming upstairs to check on things during commercial breaks.

Samantha

11

It’s all about what you want to do. If you want to make a product that can be installed on the most sites possible, then PHP might be for you since there are so many hosting providers that offer it. However I think that if you learn Ruby and Rails you’ll have much more fun developing sites or at least I do.

Affiliate marketing is not the only thing dynamic on the web. As you mentioned almost every RoR site out there is dynamic many doing far more than link tracking and branding. So while yes, there is much PHP code out there for doing things like affiliate marketing and such, you can easily do all of that in Rails without breaking a sweat. And when you are done, it can be something you can build more features on over time. That’s not true of some PHP code out there.

It’s a bit of a different mind set. If you want quick and dirty, then maybe PHP is for you, but if you want to build something that has a MVC architecture, is test driven, extensible, and fun to work with, I would recommend Ruby and Rails. Now everyone has their own opinion and there are exceptions to every rule. You can build well structured apps in most any language… its just a whole lot easier in some.

So its really about what you are wanting to do. If you are in doubt, then try both and see which you like better. Rails got the developer.com web framework of the year again this year (so that might tell you something). If you give them both a shot, I believe you’ll see why the demand for Ruby and Rails is continually increasing each year.

Jeff

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Samantha wrote:

I am comfortable with OOP. While I'm comfortable with procedural programming, I also grok OOP.

Ah, then you are familiar with closures, continuations, and duck-typing. Everyone here is whether they know it or not. Rails did all those things for us, so we can just enjoy the incredible extensibility they provide, without bothering to wonder how Rails does it.

Sorry to be brief... coming upstairs to check on things during commercial breaks.

TV? That is _so_ Last Millenium!

13

Samantha wrote:

COBOL, I spent my preschool years coloring on punchcards)

Me and my brother once made a humongous card castle in our living room out of the mini-cards. :wink:

"Show me one affiliate marketing site that is done in Ruby. In fact, show me one dynamic site that is done in Ruby."

That's silly. Affiliate marketing is just a sign-up sheet and a couple database tables. It's the equivalent of the tutorial sites in the Agile Web Development book.

Ask her "If all the PHP programmers just ... jumped off a cliff, would you?"

Naaww, read this: "Ruby on Rails at Amazon "I had a great time talking about Ruby on Rails at the annual Amazon Developers Conference in Seattle this week. I was surprised to learn how many departments inside Amazon are already using Rails for various systems and delighted by the open-minded responses from those that weren't already doing Rails.

"Amazon has historically been mostly a Perl-shop at the front end, so Ruby is not that big of a leap. Especially not for the groups that are interested in getting better object-oriented techniques and patterns like MVC going. And with the low confidence in Perl 6 ever panning out, I certainly felt an interest in exploring alternatives."

http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000558.html

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Hi --

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Thanks for all the great responses. :slight_smile:

I think I have some 'ammo' now.

Thanks so much.

(and, I think it's that she wants me to modify things written in PHP. I just don't find all that 'fun' like I do Ruby.)

Thanks again, Samantha

16

Samantha wrote:

(and, I think it's that she wants me to modify things written in PHP. I just don't find all that 'fun' like I do Ruby.)

You will learn (unlike the author of the "Programmers Hierarchy") that Ruby was invented first, was invented with the primary goal of being fun and easy to use, and that its inventors and early adopters never even foresaw Rails. That's a slightly different situation from a language grown to support websites directly.

However, yes, Rails programmers do tend to look down on all other web development. And if you had seen the market share for ASP.NET, you should wonder why MS won't just give up...

17

What exactly is the difference [as far as we’re talking here] between a static and a dynamic site. I’d think a CMS-ed kind of site is dynamic since it’s responsive to change but I can also see it being static by some definitions.

Also, @Phlip, why is using Rails as a content manager trivial?

RSL

18

Russell Norris wrote:

Also, @Phlip, why is using Rails as a content manager _trivial_?

<voice size='tiny'>Because I have no experience with any other kind of CMS except Wikis, and as an engineer I _like_ funky markup syntax...</voice>

19

Wombat wrote:

Phlip wrote:

> Ruby was invented first,

According to Wikipedia, PHP was released in 1994 and Ruby was released in 1995.

I meant Ruby was invented first, long before Rails, without Rails as a specific goal.

I know almost nothing about PHP - that won't stop me from trash- talking it - yet I had the impression it grew out of a Perl customized for Webby things. So its language was created explicitly to satisfy a framework.

Not that I think age is necessarily a good way to rank programming languages, but for practical purposes, is probably as valuable as an annecdotal, humorous ranking of relative programmer arrogance.

I remember using Wyse 100 terminals and vi. :slight_smile:

20

the original developer, basically to show off his skills to potential employers. It grew organically and started including all sorts of third party libraries, and was the defacto standard competing with Cold Fusion for a long time (still probably is).

Given its history, it is not surprising that many of the best practice techniques in (web) development are not present or baked into the application (I don;t really like calling it a framework). Rails however was designed from the start around MVC, OOP, classes, inheritance, testing, etc. It leverages the friendly "optimised for happiness" environment that Ruby provides. The more I learn Rails, the more I realise I am learning Ruby and it's tricks.

Coming from a PHP background I appreciate Ruby and Rails a whole lot more. It does provide a lot of magic if you follow the conventions (learning exactly what they are is the hard bit at the moment).

You may be better off in the long run if you do some PHP for a while, but keep tinkering with Rails in the background. Show you can do it in PHP, but then how it can be done in Rails. There is nothing more demoralizing than seeing someone implement what you have been doing in PHP for the past week do it in 1 day in Rails in fewer, more readable LOC and better flexibility.