Rails Rules

I get now why people love Rails.

I had a personal project in mind: a web-based application for organizing all the notes you collect while working on an article. Like the index cards you used to use for school reports. I decided to try Ruby on Rails, a web application framework built on top of the Ruby language, mostly to see what all the fuss was about.

Rails is the framework of choice for a wide range of startups because it lets you get up and running quickly. It works by driving home a brutal truth: Your website is not that unique.

Some sizable percentage of what you need to do for a real-world website is what everyone needs to do for a real-world website: working with databases, adding CRUD functionality, rendering HTML, mapping handlers to URLs, and so forth. "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again."

Rails acknowledges this and takes care of most of that functionality out of the box. A lot of what it does seems like magic, but really it just imposes naming conventions that will let it do the right thing most of the time. Put your User objects into a users table, and you rarely have to write SQL. Organize your URLs as /controller/action/id, and you don't have to map anything manually. Call a controller method create, and it will automatically be called to handle POST operations. And you don't even have to remember any of this: The scripts that come with Rails generate tons of the code for you, so adding a new business object into the database and HTML-based CRUD pages to manage said objects take two scripts. Two lines at a command prompt, and poof.

I gave it a whirl and came away impressed. In five hours of flying to the East Coast this weekend, I, who know very little about Rails and something about Ruby, had a functional site for creating, viewing, and editing each of the key object types my application needs. I even added a whole bunch of "it would be nice if it did this" types of features. All on the way to New Hampshire. I wrote minimal amounts of code to do it, too. I have an app that I can use — indeed, I've started using it for real-world stuff.

On the way back, I started worrying about the user interface, and that's where I began to flounder a bit. Rails is smooth sailing if you're using all of its tools, but if you want to use something such as jQuery for your front-end JavaScript/AJAX, things get tougher. Or perhaps it's that the book I used doesn't explain the depths well enough to let me figure it out. A friend of mine says it's easy, and I'm sure it is, but I haven't quite grokked everything I need to do yet.

But even with this hiccup, Rails is clearly a valuable tool that any web developer should consider.