For anyone that has been following my blog posts, this week I was supposed to post my findings switching from the Rokon Android library to the AndEngine library. Things are progressing, but not as quickly as I would have liked, so I’m instead focusing this post on a small intro to Ruby on Rails.
We have been looking closely at different modular platforms that are easily expandable. Two that initially came to mind are Ruby on Rails and Django (because I love python). Last week I installed Ruby on my local Ubuntu machine and set up rails 3.0.0. Then I set up Passenger with my local host Apache and a virtual host set up on port 8080 to my new rails environment.
The first thing that I noticed when diving into Rails is that everything seems a bit more structured. The Ruby on Rails community has things set up in a very particular way, making some important decisions for you. I’ve run through a few different small demo projects and I have to admit that Rails does some pretty awesome stuff. For example, when naming your database names/tables, main classes and methods, Rails will take care of database inserts for you. I’ve gotten pretty quick at writing php functions that do the database functions, so it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s still nice to have all of that covered by default.
If you are looking into Ruby on Rails and come from a php environment, I highly recommend the book that I have been going through, Rails for PHP Developers. They introduce you to the whole MVC setup that many different software development platforms use, and can be confusing to PHP developers that don’t separate their style and functionality code. Once you have that book, the site www.railsforphp.com/ will become a pretty great reference tool.