My experience with Ruby on Rails

So, I have this grand project to do for a client. I have been wanting to take the Ruby on Rails plunge for a while now, cause I have been hearing all these wonderful things about it. How fast you can develop it, how easy it makes programming a web application, yada yada yada. I thought I would like to write (rant) about my experiences so far.

I have been reading reading reading. Tutorials, books, how-tos etc. So far, I still don't know what the hell is going on. I think a major part of my problem in getting the hang of things is that I am moving from and ASP/PHP/.NET experience to a pure OOP experience. I am having trouble grasping the terminology and concepts of Object Oriented Programming. I think about PHP, where everything is a function. You want to do something, you jump on the PHP.com site and search, bam, either there is a built in function or someone has written some function that does what you want. You dump it in your code, modify to taste and your on to the next problem to solve. Want some help? Jump on the PHP list and you get an answer in hours. I have asked a couple of questions in the Rails list and no reply after a whole day.

Documentation? Well, on Rails, that seems to suck too. I see all this great stuff about plug ins, modules, recipes, blah blah blah, and so I download them, run the commands as the author has instructed, and nothing is working. All I get is module not found, or error, or undefined object. Very frustrating, cause I don't know what is going on in Ruby (I don't know ruby, so very tough to know where to type to get what result). If you download the code, install the code, run the code, just as the author has instructed, shouldn't you get the result the author says you will? Been burning 2 weeks trying to get some simple stuff up. Ruby and Rails stuff is to a large extent self documenting. The idea is that you place comments and such in your code and run rdoc and you get documentation. I guess authors think that is enough, as you dont' get instructions, how-tos, FAQ's, user forums, and so on. Some authors have blogs and stuff, but then they close off commenting.

I must be doing something wrong, cause I have been at this for over 2 weeks and still I have no application. Client is going to be getting pissed soon!

Well, back at it. Going to see if I can get some actualy work done.

ASP.NET Atlas VS Ruby on Rails

I just viewed the video of a demonstration on how to create a simple to-do list in ASP.net and then Ajaxify it using the .net ajax plugin called Atlas.

You can view the video yourself here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/8/85803fdd-fe9a-4783-ab37-e0c565172ffd/asp_net_atlas.wmv

The interesting thing about this video is not that you can easily take an existing .net application and extend it to use Ajax like features, but how long it takes.. in this case the video is just over 18 minutes long. Now, the thing to remember, the person who is doing the programming is probably very experienced with his platform and tools, and is very organized and prepared for the demo. While viewing the video, I thought.. "I wonder how long it would take to create the same application in Rails?" View the video posted by Microsoft above, then view my video.