27 comments

  • Rik LomasRik Lomas, over 8 years ago

    Hi everyone, I wrote this tutorial. Any questions about it and I'll be around to answer them today :)

    3 points
    • Milan HawkinsMilan Hawkins, over 8 years ago

      Full credit to you for taking the time to write this piece. It's a shame that far too many people in our industry are guarded about their knowledge, in the misguided fear that sharing their skills will somehow lead to a lack of paid work.

      The only part I take umbrage with is:

      "Our site looks so 1995 right now"

      Man, I did some bitchin' stuff in 1995, full on blink-tag-extravaganza-animated-gif mayhem! It's a shame that shit predates the wayback engine, I can't find any of my work earlier than 1998.

      2 points
  • Daniel MarquesDaniel Marques, over 8 years ago

    Ok, honest question here:

    Is RoR still relevant? It starts to seem like a fading trend, now that everyone is moving to the .JS phenomenon.

    I really don't know much about backend, thats why I'm asking

    2 points
    • Rik LomasRik Lomas, over 8 years ago

      Sure, fair question. It's about picking good tools for the job. Why should trendiness matter when picking a tool? Javascript and Node are great tools but so is Rails.

      I've taught both Javascript and Rails to students and I've found that Rails is a lot easier to comprehend for beginners. The way Rails is written is visually clearer than Javascript - you need a lot less brackets, braces and semi-colons.

      You can achieve a lot with Rails in a very short amount of time. I used to teach how to make a basic version of Airbnb to beginners in two days - that would include payments, geo-location, user registration and more. Once you understand the principles behind how it works, there's a lot you can achieve.

      5 points
      • Tori ZTori Z, over 8 years ago

        I gave up learning Javascript because of the brackets. I just totally CAN'T deal with it. Now I wanna try Ruby!

        1 point
      • Matt WilliamsMatt Williams, over 8 years ago

        You wouldn't happen to have a write up on the Airbnb tutorial online anywhere, would you?

        0 points
      • Luchia BloomfieldLuchia Bloomfield, over 8 years ago

        Brilliant answer. I learnt Ruby and then Rails first up and it was definitely a lot easier than my failed attempts at learning JS.

        1 point
      • Jeff EscalanteJeff Escalante, over 8 years ago

        For people trying to decide here, this is the correct answer. As the OP said here, it's trendiness has absolutely nothing to do with whether it's worth using, and this is always the case for every tool. In fact, I'd be cautious of more trendy tools, as they tend to be as such because they attract more beginning developers, and if you are a full time dev, tools that are good for beginner devs are not what you want most of the time.

        If you are just trying to get something off the ground quickly, rails is a great solution. It's been around for a while and has a ton of gems you can use to not write extra code, as you can see in this tutorial. To be good with rails, you do really need to understand it's internals, which is a monumental task though. So if you are investing heavy in rails, know that you will hit certain walls after a while that you won't be able to get past without understanding exactly how it works under the hood, which takes some time and a good foundation in both programming and ruby.

        If you are tying to build a more stable foundation for a larger app, starting off with an API is probably the way to go. Once you have a good API, then build out the front end in backbone/angular/whatever, or even as a native app if you want. You can also build APIs in any language more or less equally well. Sinatra is great for ruby (it's like a mini-rails), express is great for node, and flask is great for python. The flexibility of APIs is their strength.

        0 points
    • Jonathan CutrellJonathan Cutrell, over 8 years ago

      RoR is very much relevant.

      Some simple proof:

      GitHub just made a pretty large effort to migrate to a newer version of Rails (Rails 3). See this writeup.

      The master branch of Rails, which is at Rails 4.2.0 was last updated 2 hours ago at the time of this comment.

      2,446 contributors have made Rails what it is today, and it runs some of the most useful applications on the web.

      Relevance isn't about how old or "in" something is. Relevance is about matching the solution to the problem. In many cases, Rails exceeds simply because of the Ruby community and the wide range of gems available to do tons of common tasks. Making similar applications in Node is possible, but may not be as easily accomplished, simply because Node is still relatively young.

      3 points
  • Don Kerry, over 7 years ago

    Hey, is the tutorial still available? Thanks!

    0 points
  • Ben CarrollBen Carroll, over 8 years ago

    Bleh my comment was deleted. I was wondering if there was a way to make a rails app more simple. Rails just feels so bloated for a simple app like a job board or a blog. I'd be interested in any tutorials of simplifying an app down to as few files and directories as possible.

    0 points
    • Rik LomasRik Lomas, over 8 years ago

      Try looking into Sinatra: http://www.sinatrarb.com/

      Personally I don't mind the "bloat" of Rails. If I want to make anything more fully featured, all the tools I need are there ready for me to get going - no need to write everything from scratch. Plus if I ever take over someone else's code, I know exactly where everything is.

      3 points
      • Jared HardyJared Hardy, over 8 years ago

        +1 for Sinatra if you want something a little less bloated, but its all about choosing the right tool for the job. Rails can get you a lot more functionality out of the box so if you are building something more complex, the simplicity of Sinatra's core means you might end up having to do more work on your own, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

        0 points
  • Marco CanteiroMarco Canteiro, over 8 years ago

    Hey Rik! Thank you for putting together this tutorial! I'm on a Mac 10.9.5 and I can't find a link to install Rails for my version. Would you please be able to help me out?

    0 points
  • Ericson LucianoEricson Luciano, over 8 years ago

    great i was looking this thanks for sharing

    0 points
  • Jitendra Vyas, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

    I'm going to try this on Sunday

    0 points