What is Ruby on Rails?
February 20, 2006
I got an email recently asking about Ruby On Rails:
"Somebody just told me about this software program called: Ruby on Rails. It’s a very strange name to me, and I never heard of it until this evening. I was wondering if you know anything about it and if so, what is your opinion on it’s merits for creating a web page ?? "
My answer:
ROR (Ruby on Rails) is basically a web application framework built using the Ruby language. It is like ASP, JSP, PHP etc … in terms of what you can do with it – essentially, connect web pages to databases like MySQL.
ROR has a bit of buzz in the JAVA community because some big name Java geeks have played with it and found it to be much more productive than the typical Java way of doing things.
Sounds good at first, except for the fact that the Java’s way of doing things reminds me of a large government organization: lots of red tape and it takes forever to get anything done – even going to the bathroom requires you fill out forms in triplicate! If you need to go to the bathroom really bad, you don’t want to be using Java.
That said, ROR does have some neat things about it, and the language itself (Ruby,) has some interesting constructs in it that make it appealing to the Java community.
Rails allows you to create a web application very quickly because it automatically creates database connections and conversations (inserts, updates and deletes) between the web application and the database.
But ROR is not proven, may have performance issues, has a small community and a small API (not too many options) compared to Java or PHP and finally, ROR hosting is rare.
I would go with PHP because it is proven, fast, has a huge community and hosting is ubiquitous.
Stefan Mischook (Web design heretic)
