Ruby on Rails demo
This week I had the pleasure of running a demo of Ruby on Rails for the agile north group. This was a well attended session that (much as I’d like to) I probably can’t claim all of the credit for. While I have not had a great deal of experience of Ruby on Rails I agreed to run this session in part to force myself to spend a little time on it.
There seems to be a real buzz about Ruby at the moment. People from a wide variety of backgrounds are looking at Ruby and particularly Rails trying to establish what the fuss is all about and if the promised productivity can pay off in their environment.
I took my inspiration for the session from an onlamp article that describes the development of a cookbook web application. I made a number of changes to bring the demo up to date, in particular the adoption of migrations and some further emphasis on testing.
The mixed group that is always in attendance with agile north provides for an interesting mixture of view points. I was somewhat taken aback by the suggestion that migrations should be test driven. This was a significant point that had not yet occured to me. However, when relying on migrations to move databases from on version to the next we need a mechanism to improve our confidence. I would particularly like to see tests for migrating to older versions.
I did alow a little too much emphasis to be put on the benifits of scaffolding, while it’s nice to get the rapid feedback that scaffolding provides I would have liked to spend a little more time developing “real” code (test first of course).
Below I have attached, as requested, a few slides and a zip of the Rails code that we produced during the session. In addition check out the agile north del.icio.us tag for other peoples views and other relevant links.
I’m sure that this is not the last post I’ll make about rails, I look forward to making the most of this highly productive environment on a number of projects that I have in mind.
