Ruby on Rails starter II / II

Ok, after quite some hours of work I got a grasp of both Ruby and Rails’ basics. In addition to the links I already mentioned, I found the RubyOnRails API also very useful.

Some results:

I took an extra 20 minutes to add the logo. Only because I was making screen shots for my blog 🙂

I’m really tired, so some quick notes.

Yes I like the quick way of working with Ruby on Rails

No I do not like the freedom Ruby gives. I’m coming from Python and really find the Python coding guidelines very valuable. But let’s not go into that.

I’m positive about the framework. It did what it promised. But the ‘perly’ way of indicating variables really held me back: ‘product’, ‘:product’, ‘@product’ and ‘#{product}’ can all reference some product, depending on the context.

Before deciding on wether I really want to dig deep into RoR, I want to evaluate Subway, a framework insprired by Rails. It’s written in Python, which gives it a large advantage over Ruby on Rails. Sorry about that 😉

Update 2006-01-09 23:01h: Colleagues pointed me to TurboGears. Another python framework “much like Rails”. My todo list is growing…

This entry was posted on January 8, 2006 at 23:07 and is filed under Development, Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Ruby on Rails starter II / II”

FrederickRos Says:
January 9, 2006 at 07:02 | Reply
Hum … Glad to see you like RoR …

However, I do not agree with the term ‘perlish’ regarding variables naming … In Perl, sigils describe the type of the variable (list, hash, scalar …) although in Ruby they just determine the scope of the variable …
Moreover in your example, you just give 2 different variables use: @product and product. The 2 other ones are either a Symbol and a string, evaluating the product variable …

My .2 $
nederhoed Says:
January 9, 2006 at 23:11 | Reply
Merci Frederick, I will invest your .2 $ and hope to be able to give you back much more some day.

Indeed it differs from Perl. It still looks perlish though 🙂

No, you’re right. the ‘:product’ puzzled me. But it’s not a variable. Maybe you could point me to a place where the ‘:…’ is explained. Google ignores ‘:’ in my query for Rails wisdom.
The sentence about referencing a product will be corrected once I really understand why it is incorrect.

Thanks again for the feedback!
raichu Says:
January 10, 2006 at 01:54 | Reply
:something is a symbol in ruby. there’s guaranteed to be only one object for a symbol. comparing symbols is faster than comparing strings. you might wanna check out http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2005/08/19/understanding-ruby-symbols and other “ruby symbols” google-ables. technically, you can use anything for a key, but hashes in rails usually use symbols for keys.

Nederhoed