I attended the Agile 2011 conference in Salt Lake last month and although I had heard of Ruby and Ruby on Rails I was completely in the dark. Meeting many of the worlds top Rails developers at the conference I decided I needed to know more so I have taken the dive into the Rabbit hole.

What really intrigued me was a young 20 something kid that told me his story of developing a poker site after dropping out of college. He built the site to teach himself how to play poker and in the process turned it into the #1 grossing Ruby site in the world. He then sold the site and is considered one of the best in the world. I picked his brain for hours and that conversation got me all fired up.

Sites like Twitter, Groupon, Living Social, Yellow Pages, Scribd, Jobscore, Corkd, shopify etc... are all built on Rails. Rails developers are 100% in demand and live in a 0% emplyment bubble. Plus, I am having a freaking blast learning the framework and language.

My goal is to write a really cool site to manage my scuba school and sales in class. once I get that done I intend to rewrite my http://www.kona-aloha.com website completely from scratch making it dynamic and exciting. For now though I am writing a twitter clone as part of my initial learnings, the site is http://scootersample.heroku.com/. only the framework is in place right now. More will follow soon.

Through these projects, I intend to become a "Ruby on Rails" guru!

Well that is my goal... I'll post back here with updates as I get them. This will be fun.

Can you explain in short simple terms the difference between RoR and Drupal? Why would one choose Ruby over Drupal?

Sure. RoR is a development environment where Drupal and similar products are Content Management systems (CMS). With a CMS you are ties into the framwork of a product. They are designed to be a quick way to build a website. Personally I dislike Drupal, Used it, hated it. It behaves in ways that I did not like and was always looking for work-arounds. I used it for a forum and it was completely inefficient and to this day the forum is a major pain in my rear. I stopped going there simply because of Drupal and its issues. Joomla 1.6 is a much better CMS but not the question you asked.

Drupal and Joomla are both written in a development language called PHP. Ruby is similar to PHP. Being a programmer I am more interested in ways to write a custom system rather than use a CMS for a few reasons. First is speed, CMS's are notoriously slow due to so much overhead ad second to make them do what I want to do means I have to write it all in plugins using PHP and then plug into an already slow system. Using RoR I don't have the overhead of systems I wouldn't use, I only write what I want it to do.


Hope that is clear.

It's all Greek to me but looking forward to your finished product. :)

Sure. RoR is a development environment where Drupal and similar products are Content Management systems (CMS). With a CMS you are ties into the framwork of a product. They are designed to be a quick way to build a website. Personally I dislike Drupal, Used it, hated it. It behaves in ways that I did not like and was always looking for work-arounds. I used it for a forum and it was completely inefficient and to this day the forum is a major pain in my rear. I stopped going there simply because of Drupal and its issues. Joomla 1.6 is a much better CMS but not the question you asked.

Drupal and Joomla are both written in a development language called PHP. Ruby is similar to PHP. Being a programmer I am more interested in ways to write a custom system rather than use a CMS for a few reasons. First is speed, CMS's are notoriously slow due to so much overhead ad second to make them do what I want to do means I have to write it all in plugins using PHP and then plug into an already slow system. Using RoR I don't have the overhead of systems I wouldn't use, I only write what I want it to do.


Hope that is clear.Yes, that was pretty clear. Is RoR something that a non developer type person such as myself with very limited knowledge with code writing could learn and use out of the box with a bearable learning curve?

I went and searched Youtube for a couple introduction RoR video's yesterday but got bored pretty quick because the geeks that made them weren't very good teachers.

I have in the past played around with WP and Joomla and managed to create something that looked half decent but it wasn't anything I had plans to publish live, I was just wanting to learn a little about how they worked.

Yes, that was pretty clear. Is RoR something that a non developer type person such as myself with very limited knowledge with code writing could learn and use out of the box with a bearable learning curve?

I went and searched Youtube for a couple introduction RoR video's yesterday but got bored pretty quick because the geeks that made them weren't very good teachers.

I have in the past played around with WP and Joomla and managed to create something that looked half decent but it wasn't anything I had plans to publish live, I was just wanting to learn a little about how they worked.

Ruby full fledged programming language. Certainly a steep learning curve. Rails is a framework to build on top of and publish Web based applications. Neither is for the faint of heart but doable. I would only question the need. Best teaching you can get is probably this site.
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

the entire site and www.Heroku.com where the above site is hosted is all based on Rails.

Joomla 1.6 is much faster than 1.5 and from what I can tell, just as easy to work with. If you want a decent site fast and have the ability to create new content in a WYSIWYG fashion then it is my favorite.

RoR is an application development language so it is for building web based interactive and dynamic applications. Completely different in the use than a CMS.

It's all Greek to me but looking forward to your finished product. :)

Its not Greek, its Geek

Its not Greek, its Geek

:rofl: Love it!

Its not Greek, its Geek

:rofl: Love it!

:Moon: