I do not breathe your politics
"Comment is free but facts are sacred." (C.P. Scott)
Sunday, July 31, 2005
The programmer's love of the lightbulb moment
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Ruby On Rails. Very, very nice.
In the last couple of months it has gone from 'nice idea but...' to 'wow'. Until recently it did not me away from Perl, dissuade me from writing a mini-Rails framework in Perl, or provide enough advantages over the nascent Catalyst project (which aims to outdo Rails by making extensive use of the CPAN archive and childish bickering).
The tipping point for me has been the development of the scaffolding generator. Instead of just automagically doing a limited scaffold for you, it can now expand out the scaffolding into a series of templates and modules to adapt, rather than replace, piece by piece.
Until this point the scaffolding just served to deal with the chicken-and-egg nature of writing code that talks to databases. Now the scaffolding provides the basis for the development itself, serves as a handy introduction to coding in Rails, and eases the transition to Ruby from Perl for this jaded freelancer.
(I understand that Catalyst now also has this scaffold generator facility, but what it does not have is the polish and completeness of Rails.)
This afternoon I started actually developing with it, Amazon took more money off me, and the lightbulb moment swiftly followed. (Does anyone else remember Mr Don and Mr George?)
posted by Michael at 7/31/2005 02:06:00 AM |