Question

I use PHP+Zend and Java+Wicket and learn Python (so will have Django available).

So I want to know if it is worth learning RoR for rapid web-development. Is it much faster building web-apps than with the other approaches or is it neglectable?

Or let me rephrase it: What are the facts that make RoR much faster in rapid development than the one listed above and so makes RoR worth learning in addition to the others.

Answer 1

You can make other frameworks do basically what Rails gives you for rapid development….so there’s no clear “Rails is better than Java or PHP”. After all, it’s just a bunch of Ruby. A lot of frameworks (CakePHP, Asp.net MVC, have copied some of the more useful features of Rails).

However, it is certainly a lot more convenient for doing rapid development if you agree with the Rails philosophies.

Here’s the reasons.

• Scaffolding – in a command you can generate a table, model, tests, and a bunch of CRUD views and controllers.
• ActiveRecord – it’s the easiest ORM out there to use, all you need is to have a bunch of tables and you can immediately do 90% of the operations you need without having to write any code
• Ruby – it’s a language made with a lot of shortcuts that you let you write code faster in less lines
• RubyGems + Github – there is a lot of code out there that you can start using in a few commands if someone has already solved a problem you’re having.