So .. as I stated in my previous post Rails felt into my life some weeks ago.
I started looking into it and a feeling that it rocks started growing into me. In the beginning it was difficulty to put that feeling in words. I was getting surprised by features I already knew from Symfony. That was when I figured it out: the first great thing about Rails is Ruby. I’m still far from being a Ruby expert – really far – but I can definitely say that it is a powerful language.
The second thing I couldn’t let by is the hability the developers had to make a lot with a few line of codes. I want to give a simple example about it .
Let’s grab some posts with category id ‘1’ from the database and pass it to the view.
//Symfony
$c = new Criteria();
$c->add(PostPeer::CATEGORY_ID, 1, Criteria::EQUAL);
$this->posts = PostPeer::doSelect($c);
#Rails
@posts = Post.find_by_category_id(1);
Ok … I know a lot of you would say I could create a doSelectByCategory() method inside of PostPeer and I respond to that with “but I would have to do it”. In a large application that would end up with thousands of avoidable lines of code. Every single feature I code in rails feels shorter and much more readable. End of story.
Another small detail that took my attention was the partial engine. The way it accepts both a single object or a collection (iterating through it by itself) plus a view variable being created with the same name as the partial is great. Again .. nothing special but so awesomely handy.
One more example … which way of validating the length of a field looks better for you?
// symfony
$this->setValidators(array(
'message' => new sfValidatorString(array('min_length' => 4))
));
# rails
validates_length_of :message, :minimum => 4
Want another one? What’s the simpler and clearest way of declaring a relation between two of your models?
# symfony - inside a schema file which gives you no visibility in your model
business_unit:
manager_id: { type: integer, foreignTable: user, foreignReference: id}
# rails - inside your model with fully visibility - read and understand
class BusinessUnit < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user, :foreign_key => 'manager_id'
I could continue with that longer and longer … the routing system is great … I would definitely fail to describe in words how fantastic the migration system is.
Rails gave me back my pleasure to develop. And when I finish I look to the result and it’s beautiful.
I challenge you. Go to Rails Guides, read something and tell me you don’t like it. :D
Cheers!
Next: when I started I felt a little bit confused on the way to go. My next post will provide some links and tips on what I believe to be a good way for a newcomer to approach Rails.
