On the bandwagon

I'm a PHP developer by profession but this blog is a bit of a departure for me - it's a Ruby on Rails app.

I could have used pretty much any open source blog package out there, but I wanted to have a go at producing something real that worked with rails. There are also a few features I didn't find elsewhere (mostly formatting related).

My verdict: Ruby is a fantastic language. Rails is a great framework, but there is a little too much magic and opinion in it for my taste. I like to understand exactly what is going on at all levels in my apps but rails makes that incredibly hard because of all the monkey patching and the sheer size of the stack.

That's not really much of a criticism though and I think at least some of that will be much better in rails 3 having taken onboard the merb philosophy of decoupling core components.

I'll certainly keep working with Ruby and probably rails - there is something so elegant about the language that it makes going back to PHP a little disappointing. Who knows, one day I might be completely converted.

Expect me to post my web-related discoveries and opinions here in the future.