Creating a Weblog in 15 Minutes with Ruby on Rails
In the past few years there’s been a trend to expedite and simpify the process of creating a web application. The latest step in this trend (or perhaps the culmination of it) is Ruby on Rails. Rails a web application framework built upon the Model-view-controller architecture, and it uses Ruby, an easy to use object-oriented programming language along the lines of Perl.
I’ve been interested in Ruby on Rails for a while now, and what first got me excited about it is a video that uses Ruby on Rails to create a functional blog in 15 minutes:
http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov
There are some other Ruby on Rails “screencasts” available on the site as well.
I think the ability to create a working application so quickly is great, and really takes a number of MVC concepts to their logical conclusions. You could even use Ruby on Rails to create working mockups of web apps and then port them to other frameworks.
However I also think it Ruby on Rails shouldn’t be used for every scenario. It’s great for apps that have simple model objects and need quick interface code to modify those objects, but as you stray outside this environment a more robust framework like Struts or Spring may be preferable.
