My total exposure to Ruby has been around 2 hours, a great time to write about it. So warnings, n00b alert, I have not even written a ruby “hello world” script! But hey, it’s important to write when you feel inspired. I have a few people to thank for the inspiration.

Given a short code demo, it looks very flexible. It can be used to build things extremely quickly. In just a few key strokes, a model, view and controller is automatically created in the file system. Another command will quickly update the database to describe the properties of your newly created entity in its own table.

This bares some similarities with the PHP framework Symfony. You can auto generate the entities of your system in a very similar way. But I am a PHP freak, why am I so interested in this? It’s always good to have another arrow to your bow. Also, I think it’s an important message to those who want to try out programming for web applications. Perhaps students or in some cases, people who have been stuck using classic VB for the past 5 years!

Some may say that using the Ruby on Rails framework the auto generation of code is unwise. Unwieldy and unmanageable and I would tend to agree with them. However, perhaps it has some uses for prototyping an idea or a technical draft. If the specification or idea keeps changing, then its a perfect match. I am not sure if you can do this but, since its heavy on MVC, components of the system can be replaced (if necessary) with whatever means necessary.

It’s meant to be easier to develop with it in Linux and Mac than Windows. Saying that there’s a package for the Aptana editing suite for Windows that seems well suited to Ruby. There’s an online demo of Ruby, somewhere on the Internet, I will post it as soon as I remember where it is.

Perhaps in a few years, I will read this again on a site that I built in Ruby, years from now. But for now, I don’t think I will start learning Ruby just yet. There’s plenty of other things I would like to do first, that could change.