Goats on Ruby on Rails

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I enjoy a good bandwagon. So it shouldn’t surprise you in the least that I would be intrigued by Ruby on Rails. Stories of increased productivity, happier programming, and elves that write your code for you while you sleep made me think this might be what I’m looking for.

What? That’s what it said on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

Anyway, I started reading up on it, going through some tutorials, and I really liked what I saw. I love the way that data is just there. Need all of a user’s lists? user.lists has them. Need all the items on a list? list.items has ya covered. Create a table, create a model based on the table, then associate that model with other models, and you get an amazing collection of useful ways to access your data.

I decided to use it to build Gift Goat so I could put RoR through its paces. Tutorials are fun, but to find out if you have the right tool you have to use it on your own project in your own way. I wanted to see if it was something I could use on a regular basis for building the many different web site ideas Angela & I have.

So far, I really like it. Other work has kept me from spending as much time on it as I’d like (I’d hoped for a July 1 launch. That’s looking less and less likely.), but what time I have had has been really productive. It’s amazing how much you can do with just a few lines of code.

As I get more of Gift Goat done I’ll post more about what it’s like working with RoR and what I think its strengths and weaknesses are.