Workshop 8
May 25, 2009
I consider the 3 strengths to be:
1. All records in database can be called by code and return as object.
2. Scaffolding makes programming easy. It automatically generates the model, view and controller for object access.
3. Ruby is platform independent. It can be run on Windows, Linux and even Unix. The scalability makes application more portable.
I consider 3 weaknesses to be:
1. The Ruby language syntax is different from main stream languages like C#, VB and Java.
2. While comparing with C#, VB or Java the community for Ruby is small. Resource is much less.
3. Ruby on Rails is for Web application only. Thus this framework can not be applied on other application.
The most difficult aspects were:
1. After parsing the Ruby code the web page is not “what you see is what you get”. Unless you are very familiarize with Ruby you can hardly develop anything.
2. Because of point 1 it is hard to implement AJAX. I failed in doing this task.
Improvements I would make include:
Scaffolding is powerful, but in my case I was side-tracked by scaffolding. I have experience on web development with PHP, ASP, .NET and Java. I tried to complete the workshop by scaffolding as it generated all required items like database tables and MVC for me. I spent 2 days on modifying the code to satisfy the requirement but failed. The concept of RoR is different from my past experience, and the syntax is another style too. Finally I start from the very beginning, and follow the procedure of “RailSpace”, understand everything from the ground. Finally I finished those workshop. Though the improvement is not RoR itself; I learn a lesson that I should learn from the ground.
