Several months ago I had to choose among php, .net, coldfusion, asp and Ruby on Rails. I chose Ruby on Rails because I had seen the famous screencast where the author creates a blog within minutes. I even bought the Agile Web Developement book and then almost any book with Ruby or Rails in its title. To this day I am still learning without much to show off. The question is how I am going to justify so much time spent on this learning. my answer is I find this a lot more fulfilling and promising than I had bargained for.
Would I recommend it to others ?
Here is a better reply given by Michael Slater and Chris Haupt
“Ultimately, the factor that probably keeps more developers away from Rails than any other is the learning curve. If you’ve already been working with one technology, it’s always more time consuming in the short term to switch to a different one. And if you’re only working on simple sites, it may not be worth the investment.
But if you want to advance your skills and become as productive as you can be, you owe it to yourself to learn Ruby on Rails. You’ll need to invest a few months of study and practice to become proficient, but from that point forward you’ll be building better sites more quickly and having more fun doing it.
If you’re a PHP developer, you many wonder whether you can take a short-cut and use a PHP-based MVC framework instead of having to learn Ruby. In the short term, this may save you time. But Ruby is a key enabler of many aspects of Rails, and it just isn’t possible to build a framework that really matches Rails in a language such as PHP. Learning any powerful framework takes a significant effort, whether it’s a PHP framework or a Ruby framework. Learning the basics of Ruby isn’t hard. The payback is that you’ll be working in a more modern, more elegant language, and with a more powerful framework as well.
In future episodes of this podcast, we’ll explore all the key concepts that underlie Ruby on Rails. Ultimately, though, you need to begin building sites with it to really understand it. There’s a variety of good books and online resources available, many of which you’ll find listed in the show notes at learningrails.com.”
Actually this is from the transcript of the podcast . You can view the podcast here
Learning Flex and RoR simultaneously can be a hard Job for anyone especially for those who with years of designing experience but little or no programming experience.
Colin Moock has taken some pains to explain whether ActionScript is hard or not in this article titled ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not.
Well my opinion is (after reading the article and the ongoing public debate in the shape of comments and counter comments ) that end users never bother to see in which language the application is written.They just want the application to solve their problems and not force them to learn something new just to use it.
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February 18, 2008 at 5:46 pm
John Siemens
Learning Ruby on Rails is actually a poor investment of one’s time, when one considers:
RoR is notoriously slow, and does not scale due to its lack of support for multiple concurrent threads.
There is no way to execute prepared statements from Ruby, only dynamic SQL statements, which further impedes performance.
To get a lot of the magic that RoR purports to provide, you have to give up things like composite keys and referential integrity in the database.
There are hardly any paying Ruby or RoR jobs available.
July 7, 2008 at 12:45 pm
ragrawal
Have you looked at CakePHP. I tried using Ruby on Rails but as you said it has a learning curve and I didn’t see much benefit once I found CakePHP replicates almost all the functionality that ROR has to provide.
July 11, 2008 at 6:16 am
flnotes
@ragrawal
the learning curve is there because you have to learn Ruby and the whole gamut of web development to use ROR effectively. As for CakePHP, it is a good framework and its use in projects should be justified from the time and effort perspective considering you can develope web applications using php itself. btw learning ROR should a good excuse to learn Ruby.
@Jhon Siemens
there are different methods to scale the ROR applications and if performance is the main concern then Merb is a good option. In http://www.rubyinside.com (http://ruby.jobamatic.com/a/jbb/find-jobs) and http://www.railsinside.com you will find job posting related to ruby and rails.
November 22, 2008 at 5:55 pm
George
Nice post!
June 9, 2009 at 9:32 am
ashes999
You should learn Ruby on Rails. Even if you don’t use it often, you still learn a lot of lessons from the framework and the language that will change the way you code, even in other applications.
If you’re interested, you can check my website (railsrocket.com), it has a lot of tutorials and Rails how-tos. Rails makes a lot of things easy, like testing (with a separate test DB), separation of model/view/controller, internationalization, managing login/password stuff, and others.