First Foray into Rails
Posted by Ben Rometsch on 28 February 2006
Well, I spent some time last night toying with Rails. After about 3 hours last night and a couple this afternoon, I've got the backend functionality of about a third of our application written already. That's pretty crazy.
Every time I try and figure out how to do something I find myself thinking "This must be the thing that cant be done in Rails; this is where it is all going to fall down". I then spend a couple of minutes googling and find my problem solved. It's a strange feeling.
The documentation is fairly sparse, but it seems to get the job done. One thing I have noticed is the amount of blog information there is on problems and their associated neat solutions. We're now looking to add some meat to the bones of what the application looks like already. There are some aspects that need implementing:
- A decorator for our pages. A Rails equivalent of SiteMesh. We use SiteMesh a lot at the moment. It's great, it gets out the way and makes life simple. There is a similar decorator pattern in Rails, so this should not be a problem.
- An authentication framework, like Acegi. We also use Acegi a lot at the moment for our Java projects. It also gets out the way and does what you expect. It looks like there are some appropriate ways of solving that problem in Rails. I'm not yet sure how fine-grained they are but we will soon find out.