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I don't know if you've been living under a rock, but if you have, you might not have heard about Ruby on Rails. For you under-rock dwellers, Ruby on Rails is a web application framework using the scripting language Ruby. Since I knew virtually nothing about it, other than what it was, I decided to download Ruby and start riding the rails.

First impressions: wow. Just a few lines of code, and I've got a complete, albeit ugly, web application with database interactivity and everything. Now, I'm a complete newbie with Ruby, so I haven't been able to really write anything I'd want to publish, but it piqued my curiosity enough to buy the book Agile Web Development With Rails. One thing I notice with the language is how much it's different from what I'm used to. I'm mainly a C# kinda guy, and have done a fair amount of PHP, ColdFusion, VB, and ASP classic. Ruby is kinda foreign to me. And I'm not just talking syntax, I mean logically foreign. For instance in C# I might write something like this:

if (foo == 5){
System.WriteLine("bar");
}


In Ruby, I could write the same thing like this:

puts "bar" if foo == 5

or

if foo == 5 puts "bar"


That's just one of the examples that stood out to me. Ruby is, however, fully object oriented, which I am familiar with, and I fell comfortable that it should be able to get up to speed fairly quickly. It also claims to have very powerful string manipulation capabilities, and can certainly be used for other purposes than web development (I actually have a Ruby IDE written entirely in Ruby).

The Rails framework itself reminds me a little of the old Fusebox framework, but there are major differences. The Rails framework give you a complete skeleton application from the start, and actually has functionality, not just a theory of how to structure an application.

I mainly posted this to get your guys impression on Ruby and Rails if you've ever had a chance to experiment and what you think about it. A major reason I'm interested in it is to expand my knowledge to something modern yet non-proprietary. I even hear there is a Ruby.NET in development. Interesting stuff. . .

Give me your comments. I'll post more about Ruby in the future.