Ruby on Rails

Ummm, it's very good. It's the Mac of the software development world, It Just Works (tm)...

BUT, it's slow. If you're thinking of using it for a commercial product, be prepared to have to buy more servers than would be necessary in another development environment...

 

Not slow!

RoR is one of the most wonderful languages/frameworks to work with. It just works is right...

However, I would greatly disagree with the speed issue. It is true that the environment is slow when working in development (since it needs to reload all the data, functions and code everytime) but when you switch out to production and testing, the systems speed greatly leaps forward. Its blazing fast when it is done right.

Also, It wouldnt be the best of ideas to serve from the mac that you use. It just isnt good programming. Working with the code tha tyou run on the server is a pretty bad idea. Personally, I use the mac for RoR development. My production machine is seperate, Ubuntu linux served up server style...

Some good resources - both by "The Pragmatic Programmers":

Rails Recipes

Agile Web Development with Rails.

We are currently developing several nice little webapps. My site, www.jacekwollocko.com will have periodic updates as to the status of these apps.

Good luck.

 

I'm a Java head because that pays the bills but I've been learning Ruby and it's famous Rails framework the past year. It's definitely a breath of fresh air and I admire a lot of what Rails creators have done. Coding in Ruby is much less verbose than Java as well.

If your project is just an academic exercise, RoR is a great choice. The learning curve isn't steep at all. www.railsforum.com is a great resource.

 

Hi,
I've programmed in many languages over the years and Ruby is definitely my favourite. Ruby on Rails takes full advantage of the Ruby language in a way which cannot be replicated by other RoR clones in other languages. Sure, things like Cake PHP have done a great job of applying RoR methodologies to create a PHP framework but Rails is still the daddy!

I would also highly recommend the "Agile Web Development with Rails" book mentioned above along with a number of other Pragmatic Programmers titles.

Speed should not be an issue, unless of course you are running something like microsoft.com or ibm.com, and there are some good guides around which will help you to set up a production server but as the other poster said, don't try to use your development PC to serve the final website - you can either build a cheap production server or use a hosted solution. Much depends on the scale you are after and the uptime you need.

Give RoR a try, you'll enjoy it!
Craig.

 

If you're not soing anthing more complex than serving up some pages with a bit of data extracted from a database, then Rails is just fine, speedwise. But if you try to do something a bit more processor intensive, your app will bring the server to it's knees.

For example, a while back, I wrote a sort of proxy server. Basically, you directed your browser to my server, and entered in the address at which you wanted to start browsing. My server would download that page, change all of the links so that they pointed back to my server, with a parameter indicating the original link's target, and then served up the modified page to the original client (it was for a game - I wanted to be able to insert news articles onto the NYT front page for example...). Rails was fantastic for getting this up and running quickly, but I couldn't handle more than about 5 clients at once on a reasonably decent server. I had to replace all of the HTML analysis code with code written in C to get a decent throughput (upto about 50 clients simmultaneously without too much lag).

Note, I still use Rails for most of this app. It's just that everyone should be aware that if there are any computationally intensive tasks to be done, you should be prepared to have to recode those sections in C. What's nice though is that you can launch before having do the rewriting - it's a rare site that has more than 5 simultaneous clients from day 1