Wow 10 days since a post, i guess i’m getting to that stage i always do after about two weeks of blogging i start to slack off. Unfortunately it often leads to the end of my blog as well. But i am going to try to keep at it! I have this lovely domain name that i paid for, so i want my money’s worth damnit 
So what am i hear to talk about today? Well its programming. Now this might bore some people, but if you know me then you’ll know i’m a programmer and i tend to enjoy it actually. Back on topic, today i’m going to talk specifically about Ruby on Rails, which you can find out about at www.rubyonrails.org.
So why do i want to talk about Ruby on Rails today? Well mainly because i’m currently learning it so its on my mind, but also because i wanted to mention some of the amazing things it can do. Those of you who have ever developed an application in a web environment will appreciate what it can do. For example even starting a new application causes Rails to build a basic structure for you, with folders for views (html etc), classes, code, etc. This is a great way to get the developer to follow standards, because the classes are already there, they just edit and add to them, rather than have to create them.
Now i know that sounds basic, but when you start to issue commands to create your database tables you see the real power of Rails. Say you want to create a database table for a User, you would issue a command such as “script/generate scaffold user username:string age:string country:string” and it will create the database tables for you (mySQL for example). Not only is your table now setup but Rails will also use the “scaffold” command to build basic Entry and Edit pages to work with this tables data, as well as links to List and Delete the items as well. Basically in one line you have not only create a basic table, but also List, View, Edit pages that allow you to maintain these values. As a developer i can honestly tell you, holy crap that friggin rocks!
This is only a glimpse into what Rails can do, and as i said i’ve only just started learning it. This strong standards approach really does work though, and cuts development time dramatically for maintenance pages (which are often a pain). So if you are a programmer/web developer check it out, i do warn you though its a bit of a pain to setup and you might want to google for some instructions. But once you get it going, its very interesting how quickly you can get a working environment.
