AJAX and Ruby on Rails
I needed to write an application for work and needed a web front end on it. I thought I’d look at Ruby on Rails again. I’m still a bit slow at it since it’s so new to me, but you don’t get any better without practice. Anyhow, some work in hours and out of hours and I now have a nice AJAX app 
Quite a large proportion of the time was spent fixing little problems – for example was was due to me displaying something when a variable was not set to 1, or was set to 0 or.. eventually I cracked it – it had to be = “1″ – I hadn’t realised that it was being set as a string, not as a number.
Other problems were because unlike most examples, I wasn’t using ActiveRecord (which persists data back to a database) as I didn’t need to. That made life a little more complicated and I needed to understand a little more of the internals than you normally get down to.
That’s one criticism I have of the RoR stuff – the documentation seems to have a tendency to skip over the magic – it’s all very well saying that various items will be automatically picked up, but they _aren’t_ when you don’t use ActiveRecord.
Still, Ruby as a language is still very nice. I’ve really got to spend more time with Rails and the books until making a judgement, these are really preliminary thoughts.
In other news, my heatsink still hasn’t arrived 
Posted: September 25th, 2006 under Linux.
Comments: none
Write a comment