WTF is Ruby on Rails

[Useless]

I keep seeing mention of it, I've read through their site, yet I still don't quite understand what they are. Sounds like a spiffy programming environment - whatever that means - just no real explanation for the layman.

[Toby]

Ruby is a programming language ala PHP, Perl, ASP etc.
Rails is an application for creating Ruby based web applications, usually database driven.

The gotcha here is that the server hosting your custom web application must have the Ruby server software installed.

A useful tool for a large companies with in house web programmers and banks of dedicated servers. For the little guy that is likely to change hosts, PHP based web apps are probably a better choice.

[cd34]

while I am no fan of PHP, I am even a worse critic on Ruby on Rails. Its almost MVC (Model-View-Controller) but not quite. Its almost fast, but not quite. It is quite lisplike which should appeal to those people that wrote code in the 80s using lisp for recursive functions and love to write code that is object oriented and since it almost does MVC, but misses, we don't do much development with it.

MVC is probably the optimal configuration for doing coding to keep the web guys out of the code, the programmers out of the web templates and the engine that does the management separate from both.

There is no decent MVC for PHP, there are two for mod_perl and one for mod_python.

With that said, RubyOnRails has become a lot more popular because it is easy to write code for. Portability to other servers is probably not that much of a problem as many distributions now include it.

If you wanted to develop with it, weren't a strong programmer, wanted to avoid the endless security problems and lack of clue at Zend (PHP's author), then, RubyOnRails is probably a decent platform. Once you learn those methods, you'll learn why MVC is important and will probably easily be able to move to a mod_python or mod_perl MVC framework.

[Useless]

Thanks guys. The most I could get out of their site was that databases were involved. So, for a guy like me, whose programming skills extend to the ability of creating server errors, I suppose I don't have to worry about edjama'cating myself about Ruby or her Rails for quite some time.