Hear me… RoR?
I know I haven’t been updating enough as of late, but I can explain this in one sentence.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft.
…
And I work/live at night.
Alright, so two sentences. Anyway, I’m getting a bit WoWed out… guess that’s bound to happen when you grind a toon from 1-70 in 3 months… alot of sleep dep happening there. So today, instead of playing, I was reading up on Ruby on Rails. First I hit up on the RoR tutorial about building a simple recipie book. I have to admit, that really blew my mind as far as how easy it is to build basic CRUD for a database web app. The #2 thing that always seems to creep into my mind, however, is “What’s the processing overhead?” Lord knows I’m very far from being some kind of expert at optimal processing code, but I still think about it. So then I happen upon a few web blogs while looking for “wordpress rails”, thinking I would find a Ruby on Rails implementation of Wordpress, and it confirmed my suspicions that there’s always a catch when something is real easy.
I have to admit, I did have my suspicions when I got to the part in the recipe RoR tutorial where it demoed how Rails will automatically discover changes to the database and account for them… unless there’s some kind of caching, and right now I don’t know, that will be a very slow system… dynamically making code to make a website work sounds good but it’s alot of overhead, at least that’s what it seems to me.
I’ll have to look into it further. I’m impressed by the concept, as it’s the first time I’m looking into RoR, and I’m pretty sure I can benefit from learning it, but I think for the time being I better hone my PHP/.NET/JAVA skills if I want a job when I get out of… my current job.
-TJ
15. June 2007 at 3:40 pm :
RoR has a lot of benefits to it that make developing applications wicked fast. But, like you, I was also concerned about its efficiency on a server, and I couldn’t really find much about it. Whatever, I kept chugging away at tutorials. After making some simple apps with RoR, I realized that I’m not going to find an actual web server out there to host my code. So whatever awesome, mad programming I do with RoR will have to stay on my computer. That’s about the time I stopped reading into Ruby.
That’s when I looked into Symfony, a PHP framework. That way, I wouldn’t have to learn a new language. It has a lot of similiarities to Ruby on Rails, and I could make apps that could actually be hosted for real-world use. Nice site with some decent documentation. I got a little more than half-way through the 24 day tutorial, and I started building my own mini application before I realized that it’s way the heck too complicated. I mean, c’mon. I don’t want to “install” Symfony wherever I go, and I don’t want to rely on command-line execution to generate an assortment of complex code for me. Getting Symfony on my webhost was just a hassle.
So I set out again, looking for the next framework. Enter Code Igniter. I’ve talked about this framework with you before, TJ, but it’s a testimony that I’m still using it. It’s basic enough to understand, and simple enough to where it doesn’t dictate how you should code (a la Symfony and probably RoR). There’s no magic to it, no crazy command line executions to learn, no automatically generated code to figure out. You just program. There is a learning curve, but it’s tiny, tiny, tiny, especially when compared to the RoR and Symfony frameworks. Code Igniter is small in size and the performance hit is negligible. It’s extremely well documented. With CI, I feel like I could look at my code half a year down the line and still understand what’s going on.
Simplicity is beautiful.