Having scratched the surface of python, I am now starting to look at Ruby on Rails as part of some RedPixie generated work. First impressions: it’s complex! It’s a bit apples and oranges to compare python (or any other scripting language) with Ruby on Rails as the latter is a web application framework and the former is a scripting language. Comparing Ruby itself though is fair and my first impression is that it looks rather “messy” compared to python. I just mean syntactically, and that is based on just a few hours of tutorials. That’s not saying much at all so I will have to comment more when I have learned more.
For rails, I started looking at
It’s good, but personally I can’t see the wood for the trees. While RoR is in itself large and complex, it is only a fraction of the “web experience” and is built on all (practically relies on) existing web technologies: web servers, page design and layout, MVC architectures, restful design style etc. Understanding all of that is a pre-requisite to starting with RoR.
With that in mind, I found the following links useful:
http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html
and various pages under
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/.
Part of me thinks all this technology is piling up like a stack of dirty washing up dishes and if it gets and higher, the whole lot will come crashing down. Functionally it’s all fantastic stuff but increasingly, there’s got to be a consolidation of all these pieces into a technology that doesn’t require you to learn how every plate works from html at the bottom of the pile to ruby-on-rails at the top.