Ruby On Rails

Anyone experienced ruby on rails, is it worth looking at?

[hughie]

Note sure where to post this one so please move if appropriate but..

I've bumped into "Ruby on Rails" a few times recently and was wondering if anyone's got much experience with it and whether it's worth investing some time in.

A lot of the demos look interesting but they're generally things i can do quickly and cleanly using smarty, mysql and php which leads me away from wasting time on it, however i thought the same about smarty for a while and i'd be lost without it now.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

hughie

[eelixduppy]

I do not think there are many people here that use RoR. There are some relevant threads [google.com] here at WebmasterWorld that may interest you.

[oziman]

It's an interesting system, but as often pointed out to my friends who are Ruby evangelists - whenever they show me something new and nifty, I've already done it in PHP..

I think the concept of creating a structure easily is nice, but if you've done any coding in PHP you tend to (or should if you don't) have a lot stuff [classes, code, frameworks] already written.

<snip>

oziman

[edited by: eelixduppy at 10:38 am (utc) on June 13, 2007]
[edit reason] no URLs, please [/edit]

[henry0]

I agree without any reserve to the two above answers
Plus learning about it seems to require some time

Nevertheless RoR looks to be on the move
I love books... and noticed that the bookstore programming shelves are getting more and more books on the topic.

At least (as I remember) 3 or 4 RoR books
So it looks like RoR is getting some degrees of recognition.

[Marcia]

There's almost an impassioned "cult" growing up about Rails, and I understand from a newbie who started to learn it as their first language that there's a very friendly, active support community.

I was very surprised to see that some major sites are using the platform, but as a non-programmer I haven't seen anything that would induce me to take up Ruby rather than PHP, since there's already so much available open source with PHP.

[hughie]

I thought thread had died on its feet so thanks for the input

i do enjoy sticking my beak in new ideas, but i've so little time these days it's difficult, but from what i've read it's good, but not really much use for a more experienced PHP guy like me, but great for an entry level coder.

If i get any spare time over the summer i'm going to investigate, but the problem with trying new things is it gets in the way of paying customers, that costs money, and if it isn't up to scratch as a product, then could cost even more time down the line.

[Marcia]

There's an open source CMS out there written in Ruby that looked very, very simple when I looked at it. Tnat Ruby newbie sent me the URL, it might be worth seeing if I can find it again to fool with, now that I've been reminded.

[whoisgregg]

I want to learn RoR, I just can't justify it yet because their isn't the ubiquitous support for it with web hosting companies. I can build a PHP site and take it anywhere -- Ruby not so much.