world gone mad

I've heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, and finally had occasion to try to use it. This tutorial was very well laid out, and entirely true - maybe a half dozen commands and a couple dozen lines of code later, there was a nice set of "scaffolds" for browsing & editing my data model.

It didn't "guess" my data model, but I prefer to tell a framework how to handle relationships. Telling rails was as simple as adding a handfull of commands like "has_one :parent", "belongs_to :category". And then you get drop-downs for foreign key values and column sorting virtually free.

The best part - I was nervous because a lot of people who had recommended it liked rails for it's ability to "handle" the database stuff so you can focus on the application. I'm only interested (in this case) in the database, but I was impressed at how rails let me focus on just that. Sure it's got all the pretty AJAX and such, but it also can quickly figure out a self-referential join.

The lowlights of the experience were some odd bugs in Eft that had me move development over to OpenSuse quickly (but rails is contained enough that "moving" was just an rsync -ar on my project directory), and some DDL conventions rails nudges you into (I prefer "
_id" over "id" as a PK name). I'm not going to complain to loudly until I learn enough about the framework (or maybe some ruby) to know if I'm just missing a config option.