Ruby On Rails and Typo

Ruby On Rails and Typo 1

Posted by igor Sun, 30 Oct 2005 19:52:00 GMT

Here at the Uni of Edinburgh I started to learn Python because it is the defacto language used in many courses. Python is really nice and easy to learn but to my suprise I stumbled over Ruby again and a lot of things happened since I heard of the language some years ago. First of all there is really good documentation out there speeding up the learning curve and emphasizing Ruby’s features. There is a very powerful open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups. Just take a look at this :)

After I had a look at Ruby on Rails I was amazed about the fact that only very little code is necessary to implement real world web applications. Now I have implemented some JSP webapps using various frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts, etc., but none of these technologies are as easy and straightforward to use as the Ruby on Rails web framework. Thus I set my OpenBSD powered server up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails and the first thing I did was to install Typo, a very cool engine for blogging. The setup was really easy and straight forward. I used Wordpress for blogging before but I have to say that Typo beats Wordpress in many important areas:

The administrative interface is much better and easier to use
PostgreSQL is supported as DB backend
Ajax support eliminates all those nasty manual reloads, enabling “almost realtime” previews etc.
...

So let’s see how much time I can scratch together in order to really learn Ruby and implement a “real world” application with it.