A while back, I was trying out cold fusion to see if it could become my new “quickly get a website up and running” environment. I was pretty dissapointed with it. The speed / power / ease tradeoffs just didn’t feel like they were in the right place. Ever since then I’ve been using a pretty standard J2EE solution. While I’m quite happy with how that works out, I really wish I had something faster to develop quick ideas with.
Yesterday, I spent about half the day learning / working with ruby on rails. In that half-day I wrote a simple web application for a content editor I’ve been working on that:
- Allows a user to create “lessons”
- Allows the user to tag those lessons and search based on tags (with a nifty Ajax interface)
- Writes the lessons out into our version control system (with an index in a db)
- Allows the user to launch a Flex application (which I had already written) to actually preview or edit the lesson through a REST api
Now, if I had been working in my J2ee environment, I bet I could have written it in about the same amount of time. BUT, with RoR I also had to
- Set up a development environment
- Learn enough ruby on rails to get this done
- Figure out how to actually use TextMate well
So overall, I think next time I could have written this thing in just an hour or two, which is pretty damned amazing, even for such a small application.
I’m not sure whether or not I’d go the J2EE or the RoR route if I was just starting a large complex site, but for small simple things, RoR is my choice for now on.
Oh, for books, I had grabbed the OReilly ruby book and Sitepoint’s “Simply Rails 2″. The ruby book is great, really explains the language well. The rails books is really just walking you through one example without a lot of “why” so I’m pretty dissapointed with it. It wasn’t enough for me to build this simple example and I relied on google for a lot, but it was enough for me to understand what rails could do for me and to figure out what I should search for.
Update:
Spent 3 more hours with it today and added:
- Account creation / signup
- Authentication (Login / Logout)
- A comment system to let people comment on lessons in progress
- An audit log for all changes done to a lesson
RoR rocks my socks.
I’ve been diggin getting to know RoR as well but am a long-time CFML developer. I would like to suggest trying Railo (an open-source CFML engine that runs on any J2EE container — Tomcat, JBoss, etc.). It’s significantly faster than Adobe’s CF server, has a much (MUCH) smaller footpring than the Adobe CF server. It can be a little tricky to get setup and configured in Apache but I could provide you some links to excellent tutorials on doing just that.
None of this is to suggest you should leave or bag RoR. I enjoy it a lot but just wanted to offer this suggestion (combine Railo with the ColdBox framework and you have a very nice, rapid application development environment).
Not sure what exactly you are after but it takes 10 minutes to install XAMPP which will give you Apache, MySql and throws in PHP, FTP, Email server, PHPMyAdmin and some other stuff. Another 10 to 15 minutes to install CF and you have a web dev environment. Just how much faster does it need to be? Regards.
The time it takes to do an installation of a dev environment or the runtime performance of that environment wasn’t what I was talking about. For things like this, I care much more about how long it takes to develop useful things within the environment.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment “Now, if I had been working in my J2ee environment, I bet I could have written it in about the same amount of time.” Sorry about that. Thanks.
Yeah, now thinking about it, I was a bit confusing.
Here’s a way of saying it:
I have a lot of experience with Java dev environments and had one all set up to go. I bet, in about 8 hours, I could have made the described system.
I don’t have any RoR experience. But in 8 hours I was still able to make the described system.
Next time, with my new RoR experience, I bet I could make it in just an hour or two.
—-
But all that being said. Now that it’s a couple days later, and I think more about it. I’m no longer convinced I could have created the same thing in a day in Java, even with my level of experience. So maybe that first statement should have been
I have a lot of experience with Java dev environments and had one all set up to go. I bet, in about *16* hours, I could have made the described system.
It might be that for me, on simple projects RoR is 5-10x faster in terms of development time than Java.