Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I mentioned awhile ago that I was going to give Rails another shot. I installed ruby, Rails, and RIDE-ME shortly thereafter and it was very easy, just as promised
I installed everything based on this tutorial I found.  The installation was even easier than expected since I already had MySql installed and thats the meat of the installation instructions.

So I got everything going soon after that last post. Everything worked so I was happy, but I still hadn’t done any Rails stuff, and I didn’t have any time to mess around with it until tonight.  I gotta say that after seeing first hand how a rails application works, I’m really impressed.  I love that it generates lists and detail forms for you, then leaves it up to you to do any customization, having a simple list and form to start from really speeds the development along nicely.  I also really like the built-in server that RIDE-ME has, its nice to be able to hit the ‘play’ button and have my web site show up, without worrying about IIS, etc.
Developing for Rails definitely takes a change in mindset from an asp.net web site.  I was trying to maintain some state and pass around variables in the query string when I had the realization that I didn’t need to pass any variables around if I simply setup new actions in my controller.  Since the action is used for a specific purpose, my state and intentions can be inferred from the action I’m currently on.

I’m excited to become more familiar with Rails so that I can move on to doing some Ajax stuff with it.  I’d like to get a good handle on Rails before I tackle that however, but this is the most fun that I’ve had learning a new language/technology in a long time, and I think it’s because the barrier to entry is so small.