An overview of Ruby on Rails from a Django user

So Ruby On Rails is worshipped as the best thing to develop a web-application after sliced bread, so I’ve decided to take a look at it. Ruby on Rails use an Model-Controller-View (MVC) pattern, which has the goal to disentangle the way you represent the data with the data itself. It may does not make too much sense, but trust me, it does.

The MVC paradigm is also used in Django, which is a python web-framework which uses the same principle and which I’m familiar with, given the fact I’ve picked it up to develop the SustainableSouk.

So the first thing I needed to do is to map my Python knowledge to Ruby, and my Django knowledge to Rails.

Difference in the languages

Ruby is a dynamic typed language, with an interpreter which takes care of the garbage collector and so on. Both languages are strongly Object-Oriented, and mostly they work in the same way, however there are some little difference which are good to point out: (1) the return value at the end of one method, (2) the difference between puts and print

Talk is cheap, show me the code — Linus Torwalds

The same class in Python and Ruby
https://gist.github.com/3828819

As you can see, the languages are amazingly similar at first glance.
Ruby does not care about indentation, but it defines the logical code with a keyword at the beginning (class or def for example), and it closes them with the end keyword.

The other major difference, at this level, is the implicit return of the method. In Ruby every method return the last line. And puts covers the same function of print.

The frameworks

Well, let’s move on on Rails, are we not here for that?
Rails ships with rake tasks, which makes very quick to throw the scaffolding of a project in no time (rails new my_project). This is similar to the django startproject command for djangonauts.

Ruby is all about configuration, and somehow resembles a lot django. You have a controller (view in django) function which gets called when a certain url match a certain pattern, defined in the config.rb (urls.py in django). The main difference is that ruby gives a lot of urls for free using a RESTful scheme.

So the best way to get used with a system is to create something, so I set up a repo to do just that.

The process is quite straightforward, especially if you already know HTML5, CSS, SCSS and Javascript which are assets you can re-use in the rails app. I’ve deployed the demo app on heroku here

Summary

Moving from Python to Ruby, and from Django to Rails is not a too big jump, and I reckon, at least at the beginning when you don’t go deep into other libraries, you can get quite up to speed pretty soon. At the end, it’s more or less the same way of thinking.

P.S.: If you are in Cambridge and interested at Django, HTML5 and so on we have set up a Django Cambridge Meetup and our first event-get-together is going to be on the 17th of October. I hope to see you there.