Sunday, July 24, 2005

Buy the language and framework, get practices for free!

Posted by admin

John Nunemaker was already “happy” developing application in Cold Fusion and PHP, so why bother learning a new language like Ruby? Or so went his thinking, until he saw the new 15 minute intro movie:

Within three to four minutes of viewing the intro, my jaw had dropped and I was beginning to giggle and snort as only a geek can. My mind began to race and when I say race, I mean I almost had a melt down. It looked so easy. I cleared my already empty Friday night schedule (Steph was shopping with her mom) and decided to go through a tutorial and give RoR a shot.

John went on to create his first simple Rails application in just an hour. It’s not only serving as an experience to get to know Ruby on Rails, but also a gentle way to be introduced to great practices for web development. Like using Model-View-Control.

I really like the idea of Ruby on Rails being a way of introducing great practices and patterns to a larger pool of developers who might not be working with them already. By lowering the learning curve of the infrastructure, the good development manners are much easier to sell.