I do believe the RoR site says its for small to medium sites/apps. It may not be great for programming an entire CMS (I dont know, maybe it is?), but you sure as hell could use it to program certain parts of it...
Indeed it is catching on, so is all this AJAX stuff, while RoR might not be the "second coming of christ" it is bad ass and it does save the coder a TON of time. Allowing him to focus more time on other things that need it.
I would think that almost anyone can at least make the Cookbook, and Todo stuff in the tutorials... I mean, its so simple it almost hurts. Check them out, even if you dont plan on using it, they do give you a nice example of what it does and how easy/quick it does it.
Yeah, but that is it, "rails saves you so much time" but is that all? If that is all, I can point you several thousand PHP coders and libraries that save you very much time, I have a friend who doesn't actually code anything useful in any language, but he codes definition libraries and such in almost every language imaginable, he was a DLL developer for some software company before the bubble bursted, and that is what he has been doing since, and using his addons I have coded several small PHP apps, even if I know PHP as well as I know latin, which is about both sides of a zero.
And that is what I just get amazed at, people going nuts and cranberries over something so simple it almost lobotomizes me, even the guys at my work place who know nothing about web development are telling me about it, and I'm sure as hell, that they have not touched it with a long long stick.
But after saying that, I AM going to read those books, I spent alot of money on them for christ sake, but AFTER I have finished with the LUA and Python books.
I dunno, Im not really authorized to speak on behalf of what RoR can and cant do...yet. I've just started, so I am as newbie as newbie gets. I can only speak of what I know of and have found out as of now. Which so far, is its ease and quickness.
Making the same todo list/cookbook in php is easy (for me), but it would have taken more than the few minutes I did it with RoR in. And its nice, I dont have to type out (or copy/paste) all that code. I like it, dont think I will migrate to it 100%, but I will try to utilize it as much as possible.
Kosmo, you'll just have to use it before you can truly comment on it. Its not just about ease of use, there's just a ton of factors that go into it. Its just flat out a smart framework that does all of the low-level stuff for you and really gets your working on some serious apps.
There's a very good reason why BIG NAMES in the web industry that formerly used PHP, Java, or even .NET are taking notice and using it, and its not just because it makes things easy for you.
And PHP just looks ugly next to Ruby, honestly. I can go into the source of Vanilla and I appreciate how clean and how well it is done for a PHP app, but the syntax is just an abomination once you've been using Ruby for awhile.
Call me an idiot, but which of the million 'source files' do i actually need? It seems to be shouting about rubygems but that doesnt seem to have much useful to it?
I'm actually questioning the same thing with mini here, I have studied scripting exclusively, I tried C and Java in school, but since I realized that scripting is the smart mans move, I moved to there, the RoR solution of one hundred files created on the fly for your "convinient" program doesn't just seem that "easy", compared to down dirty hand coded PHP or anything for that matter.
And for the record, I have read some of thr RoR documentation, I'm just a sponge when it comes to knowledge :D
When i was asking about source files i meant to install the server so i can run ruby stuff much like i use apache. Or doesnt it work like that. I dont get it?
I don't know if it's the fact that it's 3:25 on the morning here, or the fact that I'm hammered, but I just misunderstood what you were saying. But what I said still stoods, Rails tend to create way more files than what I need.
but how do i get my nice debian server to the point where i can do a ruby and think 'woah, this was worth the effort' For that matter, how do i get my nice windows server to the same position. I ran through the installer which flashed and jiggled a lot but doesnt really seem to have achieved much.
I'm actually questioning the same thing with mini here, I have studied scripting exclusively, I tried C and Java in school, but since I realized that scripting is the smart mans move, I moved to there, the RoR solution of one hundred files created on the fly for your "convinient" program doesn't just seem that "easy", compared to down dirty hand coded PHP or anything for that matter.
Because in PHP you ultimately end up with spagetti code. Once you understand what those different files do, it because very simple to manuever around where you need.
Its important because it keeps your program structed. You are better off in the long run (and the short run because ultimately you are developing much faster in Rails).