Ruby on Rails—todo list tutorial
I just finished going through the todo list tutorial on the Ruby on Rails website. All I can say is Wow!!! I have never created an entire CRUD web application that quickly. I am definitely hooked on Rails. How can I not be, I created an entire (highly simplistic) personal todo list web application in just under an hour and most of that time was spent reading through the tutorial.
However, I do have some complaints with the tutorial. The first is that it is far to simplistic to the point of being trivial. Yes it does a very good job of getting a newbie up and running with the different concepts of Rails, but it only deals with a data model containing one table with three columns. In the real world this would never happen. It really needs to ad a second table.
The second complaint that I have is that it seems that the author gets bored of the writing the tutorial somewhere around the half way point. The beginning is excellent with everything explained, but by half way, the author is simply telling the reader to read through the comments and figure it out for themselves. Now, the code is very simplistic and easy to understand and in sections very well commented, but a certain attitude of boredom seems to come out in the article.
Other than that, it is an excellent tutorial that does an excellent job of introducing the power of Rails.
I looked at the tutorial, involves writing 10 or 12 files
with a text editot, not my idea of simple.
By simple I mean like VBasic, or any Borland IDE on windows:
drag & drop, date bound fields
I dont want to hard code all my CRUD 20 or so fields.
To repaat: “simple” must have a graphical IDE. That is the huge lesson that Linux hasnt got yet.
The ONLY true simple web-development system I have seen so far is Suns Java Studio Creator.
Sadly it isnt reliable on rowsets. It may work on tables, where there is a local cache of the table.
Its amazing to me how Rowsets work fine from an application, even when the db is remote. But when you go ‘web-based’ Rowsets fail.
One day the 500 acronyms around web-based will be a laughable historical relic. People will look back and say ‘how did people ever get into that morass”
“JSP JSF Struts Maverick WebWork SpringFramework skyway etc etc…”
I will get back when I have tried the tutorial
cheers
Giordano
Simple does not require a GUI. How can you say Linux hasn’t gotten the GUI lesson followed by the best you’ve seen is Suns? Did you forget that Sun develops Solaris? Not wanting to hand code 20 or so fields is simply lazy, even by using a GUI you still need to configure each field.
By “Simple” one means you do not have to do nearly as much to achieve the same results using Ruby on Rails. If your looking to drag and drop applications, stick with VBasic or Macromedia. Using a GUI/IDE to code applications limits you to the application you are using. Hand coding allows you to harness the power of your brain, and do anything you want with the code.
Writing 10 or 12 files in a text editor is easy. Even more so when you use the keyboard commands as text editors were made for. Having 10 small files is more productive then one huge 400 line file.
This is the problem with web development today. Those who teach themselves how to program using an IDE, who then can not program anything for the life of them using just a text editor. You don’t fully understand how and language works and everything you can do with it.
And I do not belive that all of the acronyms will go away some day. Each web application technology has it’s high points and it’s low points. No one platform will be best for all applictions, developers, and networks.
I agree, the author does get bored half way. It was very good for awhile then became a pastebin. I really didn’t learn much. The code got super confusing.