09 November 2011

ROR + RubyMine impressions (from a .NET Dev)

Playing with RubyMine and ROR today. I'm actually hoping to build something real with this in the next few days. Well, a few days might be optimistic. I'm a .NET dev and I remember people saying that MVC was really just Microsoft-ROR. Didn't know much about it at the time but I'm starting to see it.

Here are some impressions of RubyMine and ROR, in no particular order.
  • What a deal: I got RubyMine for $35. A steal. Part of the 'Winter is coming' sale. Someone's been watching too much Game of Thrones eh? 
  • Autocompletey magic: Love the auto complete in RubyMine so far. I've never seen Visual Studio pick up on `<` as well as RubyMine does. Gives me every option that I could ever want to put next to a less than. 
  • Ruby is: I don't know yet. Still deciding. 
  • VCS: RubyMine's source control integration is effortless. Makes me wonder why MS hasn't made a decent plug in for SVN by now. If a $35 product can pull it off but a $5k+ product is 'missing' that, well what's the deal? 
  • Console: wait so I can interact with my model directly from the command line? http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html Section 6.6 (no anchor there?!). OK that's pretty cool. 
  • Wizard-ish things: `rails generate model ...` makes Rails stronger in code generation than Visual Studio? Weird. I expected a lot of 'type this text into a new text file'. Instead there's a generator that takes care of that for me. The generator also builds functional tests and unit tests? Testing as the norm instead of a 'like-ta-have'. Huh. 
  • Associations are built into the routing (nested resource). Interesting. 
  • ASP.NET MVC = C# on Rails? Yeah I can see it. Wonder what web language used <%= %> first. 
  • Speed speed speed: this one keeps coming back to me as I read the getting started guide. Something that would take me half an hour in C# MVC would take maybe 4 mins in ROR. Most of that time is in the database. And I'm not including the migration time for a database that is in a new environment (e.g Beta) in the .NET world -- what version is the db in now and what version should it be migrated to? In C# MVC: don't know and don't know (usually). In ROR: known and known. Versioning and migration are built in over here in the ROR world. This I like. 
More later.

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