Ruby On Rails. Wow!

I played around with Rails awhile ago and was slightly impressed but felt that it was not powerful enough or required to much fiddling to get anything powerful done. This was probably also due to the level of web coding competency I was at. I wasn't ready for the things that Ruby on Rails had to offer.

Recently I have been building more expandable coding in PHP (like a FormConstructor etc) and have been thinking of ways to make my coding easier. Enter Ruby on Rails again! The tutorials on the net are a bit more mature now and the documentation is improving.

I decided to reimplement a new feature I added to my company intranet in Rails. I built a customer complaint system for KFC. Nothing complicated, just a basic form (name, address, complaint, cost etc). It took me about 2 hours in PHP to create this form and integrate into the site. This includes building the table, add the PHP code and designing the HTML code.

In Rails this took me about 10 minutes. You create a database file (just a text file) and say what fields you want. Run a script which creates the table in the database and creates some scaffolding (html and ruby code). And bam! you have a complaints system where you can add, edit & delete complaints. What's even cooler is that the database file you created can actually be rolled back, so that you can add new columns to the db and roll back if something stupid happens.

Ruby also makes unit testing really easy (as in 1 line of code easy). It's amazing how little work you need to do to get great results. In comparison to PHP it's simply indescribable how much more work I could get done.

But there in lie's the problem my hosting company does not support (and has no plans to support) Ruby on Rails. So for the meantime I'm stuck in the world of PHP. But now that I have seen the 'light' PHP coding is like coding with one arm tied behind my back.