"Blah, blah, blah... I've never used a Framework before... Blah blah blah... This is the best thing I've ever experienced... Blah blah blah."

Color me wrong, but I hate posts like this, just not cool.

Well, although I did enjoy the rails framework quite a bit, it's certainly not the first framework I've ever worked with. I've built applications with struts, ASP.Net (1.0 and 2.0), JSF, Django, etc, and I really do think rails is my favorite yet. My apologies if that offended you at all, I'll try to retain a little more cynicism next time. ;)

Let me take my own medicine here.

Welcome! You are going to enjoy frameworks! They are really cool!

Those of us who don't have the time to try out so many new things would appreciate an essay on the subject of "why I, as a brand-new user, found Rails so much more fun than Django or .Net". If nothing else, it would be fun to have an iota of actual evidence that I can cite when I'm patting myself on the back for having chosen Ruby and Rails over the others.

Don't become cynical right away. The framework community is awash in cynics at the moment. There's a backlash, dontcha know, because folks are aghast that after three whole years of hard work Fred Brooks is still right: Rails and Django and CakePHP haven't made web programming as easy as sneezing. It's still just web programming. You type, and you type some more, and you get a brief glimpse of joy, and then you fire up IE 6.0, and you burst into tears. Some things never change.

See? Working too hard at the coal face can make me cynical too. So for god's sake have some fun and be proud of having fun. We could all use some enthusiasm!

Modded up for that IE 6.0 gem.

Nah don't be cynical. I'm pretty sure most people had the same glowing reaction the first time they used Rails (or something like it). Heck, I still have to use Hibernate at the day job, so getting home to ActiveRecord and DataMapper just makes my day all over again every night.

I think your post has gotten garbled in transmission. What you meant to say was:

"Welcome! You'll find that you'll enjoy using frameworks; they are really great."

Or

"Once you're done learning the basics you should try out my Project X extension which does Y and Z and is scalable and only costs $19.95 from my startup. Help me pay the rent! :)"

Or, at the very least,

"I hate all existing frameworks. After you use them for a while you will encounter problems Foo and Bar, for which the solution is to adopt Parrot on Parade, the new meta-meta-framework that I invented last week."

Sneering at new users is not cool. I'm sure you didn't really mean to do that. It's just my cable modem acting up again.

The OP didn't appear to be "sneering at new users", but complaining about a post that contains nothing but drivel.

That said, the story is scoring well. I blame premature upvoting and the lack of vote take-backs.

I don't think he was sneering at anyone... just (accurately) pointing out that this post has been lost in time since early 2005, and no one has any idea how it finally arrived here today...

Thank you Stillinmotion, These kind of post were great 2 years ago, but now its such a cliché.

If high-level languages and frameworks make developers happy and productive, and Rails makes those accessible to new users, then isn't Rails ultimately a great accomplishment?

My issue with rails is one of tone. There's something very off putting about the use of the word "evangelist" in the rails community. Everyone I've spoken to who uses rails gets this far-away, misty-eyed look when they talk about the framework. I love programming as much as the next guy, but there's nothing out there that inspires this kind of fanatical devotion in me.

I've been coding for a living for 11 years, and I've seen cool things come and go. Rails is pretty cool. It's not the first cool thing or the coolest thing I've ever seen, but all told, it is pretty good, and I use it and like it. They deserve credit for it too, it was a big leap forward compared to the other web stuff out there.

Agreed, Rails has made web development even more fun and powerful than it already is.

In addition, Rails has also helped explode Ruby as a language. This is what pg should be doing for lisp, creating an easy to use, elegant framework built upon lisp. I haven't tried Arc yet, but I hope all the developers take a few cues from DHH and Rails.

Rails fapper...we all know only real programmers code in Ramaze :-) oh you could also throw in Lua as well.

Man, Lua is getting more and more mention these days. I need to find a new language! I'm losing my indy cred!

;P

Dude you should so try Lua out! I love the way you can craft OOP out of the language by using meta tables.

Wow, talk about two years behind the bandwagon. How is this "News"?

Think Rails is better than Django?

Having used both for various projects, IMO, no.

Honestly, I think that comes down to the developer's preference of python over ruby, or vice versa.

In my case, I prefer django.

Django is much more flexible, stable, and ever changing. It is key to success.

"... stable, and ever changing."

Um, what?

Has anybody had any experience with TTD with something like rspec for rails? We're considering switching to that for some of our internal development applications, but I am curious to see what others think of it.

Yeah, RSpec is better. I didn't get the fuss when I first switched from Test::Unit; it's really just nicer, more clear syntax.

After doing RSpec for a while, writing with Test::Unit seemed really clunky and annoying, especially when reading tests.

I don't use the new Story stuff in RSpec. That seems geared more toward non-programmers who spec things out to be coded by others.

Writing tests is like writing anything else: you can write shitty tests in Test::Unit or RSpec. Neither one will necessarily help you to write good, short, idempotent tests, which is the really important part.

I like the RSpec/autotest combo, but I'm not exactly the guy with the wealth of experience. I've been working in Drupal recently, and the elegance of something like RSpec seems like a distant memory now.

My advice is to watch a few Peepcode screencasts (I gotta start collecting affiliate fees from that guy, I drop his name so much) and just pick a method and start. Don't get too obsessed with exactly which flavor of the testing religion you are adopting; play around with it a while. RSpec is as good a place to start as any, although you should obviously know enough about Test::Unit to read and recognize other people's vanilla unit tests.

I'd be sure to try autotest with whatever else you use, though, because it's fun to get the dynamic feedback.

You can learn way, way too much about Rails testing by reading Jay Fields' blog. There was also some useful stuff on the Thoughtbot blog, back when I was actually paying attention.

what a useless article. wow, rails rocks because it has mvc, you don't have to write sql statements and it's written in ruby!!!1! ActiveRecord is really one of the worst things about Ruby, largely due to DHH's hatred for DBMSes more complicated than MySQL 4. Also someone needs to tell him how RoR scales, heh.