Ruby on Rails

[skaterdav85]

I've been looking into ruby on rails, and I was wondering what other people's perspective on this technology was. Also, how do you tell if a site was made using ruby on rails? What makes it quicker to develop in versus a language like php?

[Synook]

Ruby on Rails is a framework, a bit like CakePHP for PHP (MVC, very tight, convention over configuration, etc). You can't really find out whether a site was made using Rails unless it tells you (though it uses certain path conventions that you could try to look for). And the reason developing with it is quicker than using pure PHP (or Ruby for that matter) is of course because it is a framework and so lays much of the foundation for you, as well as setting up and encouraging conventions that speed up development.

[skaterdav85]

Couldn't you tell if a site was in ror by the file extension types? What do ror files end with?

[Synook]

Ruby source files end with .rb (usually), but as with most frameworks it uses extensive URL rewriting to provide a path system that suits its organisational style. So your URLs end up as /products/add or something like that.Remember, RoR is not a language.

[skaterdav85]

so is it like a cms where you just configure a bunch of things?

[Synook]

No, it's a MVC web framework. So it involves both configuration of existing code and the writing of your own code that extends the generic utilities provided so they apply to your actual application.That's what the name refers to - it is "Ruby", the scripting language, "on Rails", that is, structured into a system which developers can easily go along with.