Robert on Software Development

Until about two weeks ago, I had no idea why so many developers were going ga-ga over Ruby on Rails. It wasn’t because I had a problem with Rails; in fact, I didn’t have an opinion at all. That’s the beauty of ignorance.

But as I started to delve deeper into SubSonic for my current project, I realized I needed to learn a bit more about the product that SubSonic is somewhat based on, specifically ActiveRecord. I figured, what better way to gain insight into how SubSonic works than to understand the genesis of the whole thing.

My foray into Rails development has been swift and deep. Now I get it: Rails lets you build Web applications very quickly, and it does that by requiring an adherence to a specific architecture that is governed by one person. It makes total sense.

That paragraph could be taken as a bash on Rails, but in fact, it’s not. I really like Rails. I really like that Rails is overseen and designed by one person (well, technically two). I think that’s a strong feature of the framework. In the .NET world, we don’t have that. .NET is meant to be general-purpose. It’s designed to let you create your own frameworks, and it gives you a million ways to do everything right and a million ways to do everything wrong. As I said to a colleague several years back, “.NET’s flexibilty is inflexible.”

Learning Rails is making me a better developer. It’s forcing me to learn new ways of doing things. I didn’t expect the exercise to have such an immediate and valuable impact. If I take nothing else away from this experience, I’ll at least have a much broader understanding of this business.

And MVC, of course.