Not in code

I’ve been playing with Ruby and Ruby on Rails recently. Here are some very early thoughts.

Ruby

• I love its clear & succinct syntax. As several people have already said, it looks great for creating DSLs.
• Runtime/dynamic type checking. No opinion yet, other than ‘interesting’.
• Lexical blocks, yeehaa!
• A million different ways to define class level members (and other things, I think), why? I think I just need to understand this better.
• A culture of unit testing, goodo.
• The tutorials, docos and a hugely passionate & welcoming community. Mind-blowing. Kathy Sierra loves this, I do too. It’s infectious.
• Lack of a decent IDE (I haven’t found one yet anyway), considering the last statement I’m sure there’ll be one along soon. RDT looks promising.
• Rubgems. Rocks! I can’t believe how easy it is to download & install with gems. But then I guess I haven’t spent in a lot of time in Debian land recently, it could be that I’m just easily impressed. I’ve also heard this stuff is super-easy in the Mac world, can’t wait to find out when I finally get my Powerbook.
• Multi-platform – means I continue to use it on my Mac, yay!

Rails

• The seemingly “impressive” demos that show web pages automatically update themselves when a database table is updated. Misleading, but then Four Days on Rails appears to make up for this.
• Scaffolding, interesting, “feels” open to abuse to an extent but so are so many other powerful tools I suppose. A case of Spider-manesque – “with great power come great responsibility”?
• The Generators that come with Rails, I *love* these.
• More tutorials, docos, videos etc, excellent again.
• Included Webrick – I cannot understate how great this is, when I was first learning about JSPs, Servlets etc getting Tomcat running just right was a pain. At the time, I gave up and went with Resin. I don’t mean to bag Tomcat, just saying that having a webserver all included with the framework makes it much easier for a nube like me to focus on a higher level of abstraction initially.
• Trails – Rails for Java? Rails has piqued my curiosity enough for me to add Trails highish on my To Research list at RememberTheMilk.
• R.I.P. ugly MS Access home grown databases. Here’s a low barrier of entry alternative that’ll allow you to build a much better engineered application.
• Watchout Java/Struts/Webwork/Spring/J2EE etc? I don’t think so. I believe that each of these technologies still has their place (I just wish I could say I understood them all well enough to state what this is in each case :P)

Finally, a disclaimer. As I said before, these are very early, nascent thoughts. To say that I’ve only scratched their surface is probably an exagerration. So, please forgive, but point out any (and I’m sure there are a few) errors, misconceptions or gaps in this post.