So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

Unnecessarily critical and <i>not</i> amusing. To bring up jruby and rubinius for someone starting out in ruby??? Why not also confuse him with Macruby ?<p>I develop more for fun .. i develop in ruby 1.9 and test to see it works in 1.8.7 also. No big deal!<p>I use "gem" for installing gems. Not bundler. No need to confuse someone new with RVM and ask him to play with all versions of ruby till he finds the one that suits him.<p>Its like asking a Java developer to try out all versions of Java starting with the 1.0 version, or asking a python developer to try jython and IronPython in addition to the 2 or 3 current versions.<p>What about perl. Should a new developer try out perl 4 and perl 6 too first ?

I actually think this is a little unfair.<p>Yes, the number of choices in Rails has proliferated, but a new user can easily ignore these choices. I don't think the situation is at all equivalent to the Java stack (which is the only other one I can comment on).<p>To use Java, you probably want to use Maven, Spring for dependency injection, an MVC framework (Struts 2, Spring, Tapestry, etc...), an ORM framework (probably Hibernate, probably with JPA?), though there are other choices.<p>This blog lists a bunch or Rails/Ruby choices. However, it's important to keep in mind that essentially <i>all</i> of the things a newbie needs to get started with Rails are in a single, self contained framework that is (in my opinion) incredibly easy to use.<p>I had well over five years of Java experience when I took on the latest in Java-based web framework. A book on Struts 2 covered Spring, but not Maven. A book on Maven covered MVC, but used Spring's MVC. A book on Spring MVC used Ant for the build, not Maven. Ultimately, I had to spend a great deal of time researching these technologies to just get my first simple app up and running. You <i>should</i> spend some time getting to know your framework and not just rely on magic. But should you have to do this for weeks or even months before you can write a simple webapp?<p>For rails... well, there's absolutely no need to worry about JRuby, IronRuby, or Ruby Enterprise, and whatever tutorial you're doing on Rails will tell you what version of Ruby you need. You don't need to download <i>any</i> of that windows crap mentioned here. You can ignore Sinatra for the time being. Gems are utterly simple to use (try adding a Maven dependency some time, especially one that doesn't have a public repo). You don't have to download <i>any</i> database to get started with rails, but you will have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to configure applicationContext.xml in Spring (or however you decided to go about it).<p>In fact, I think you can be a successful web apps developer with Rails and <i>never</i> bother with anything other than the basic defaults (ok, you'll want to use a different database).<p>Ok, I realize I've been ranting. But there's a <i>huge</i> difference between a proliferation of choices that can be ignored, and a proliferation of choices that have to be understood and dealt with before you can write your first app.

It's important to distinguish between Ruby and Rails. The setup and configuration of Ruby hasn't increased in complexity much over the last few years. (Keep in mind you don't have to use Bundler to use Ruby; Bundler is used in Rails 3).<p>Back in 2005/2006, it was easier to install Rails. There were less choices which made configuration and setup easier (but which also meant you could do less).<p>Now Rails has matured and has a large community. There are more features, more Rails-related gems, and the architecture has more choices and moving parts. As a result, you can do more with Rails now, but the learning curve and setup costs are stiffer.<p>Back in 2005/2006, Rails had a reputation of being easy to set up and dive into. Even though that's no longer true in 2010, the reputation for being easy to pick up has stuck.<p>Here's a glimpse of how it was "back in the day": <a href="http://www.garbett.org/blog/?p=88" rel="nofollow">http://www.garbett.org/blog/?p=88</a>

You could write the same article for most in-depth subjects.<p>Want to try model airplanes ? Get ready to spend a couple of days just to figure out the various materials, radios etc<p>Want to try computer assisted music ? Which plugin ? Which host ? How do I write music with this, etc ?<p>You could even rewrite the article for Java a few years back at least (should I go WebLogic ? WebSphere ? TomCat ? Struts or something else ?).

While I don't _disagree_ with this... it's the place the Ruby community has chosen among the 'stability vs. innovation' continuum. The Ruby community may be a bit chaotic, but it also innovates and iterates really fast.<p>I also choose to use Arch and not Debian on my computers. Such is life.

This post strikes me as not really about Ruby but about software development in general and specifically developing web apps. There isn't much insight here, of course it is hard and the language and framework don't matter much.

As someone who has been tinkering in Ruby for a couple of months, I can see where the author is coming from.<p>Personally, I tried to spend time on what was stable (Ruby 1.8.7 and Sinatra). This allowed me to focus much more on the language yet still feel productive.<p>Once you get past getting started, the decision on what to use (or who to ask) become much clearer.

Hey guys, I really want to learn ruby for web development, but without rails or sinatra or any framework. I want to start from zero and go all the way up.<p>I want my first app to be:<p><pre><code> puts "&#60;h1&#62;Hello world&#60;/h1&#62;" </code></pre> and I'll take it from there.<p>Any good tutorials or docs?

90% of this rant could be solved by just using Rails 2.3 until Rails 3 becomes more stable. Why be a guinea pig and waste your time if you don't have to. There is nothing wrong with not operating on the bleeding edge if it decreases your productivity.

I know you were trying to be satirical, gisikw, but you could have offered some suggestions or solutions. For example, I've often commented that I do not know whether a gem runs on 1.9 or 1.8. I have to test it out.<p>There are many many ruby projects on the rubyforge site that have never released code. They still exist after years! and they come up in searches. There are those that are obsolete, broken, or with not one line of documentation that one has to download, go through source code to figure out what it does, and if it does anything at all.<p>When a person comes in to ruby he needs a starting page on ruby-lang.org that tells him the popular gems or frameworks for major uses: such as CLI programs, web dev, scientific computing etc. What some call a list of "blessed" gems/projects.<p>However, we cannot criticize ruby if everyone is writing his own framework, parser, templating engine etc. Its also hard to be critical that so much documentation and tutorials online are outdated/broken due to the constant rate of change. Either devs are not updating tutorials/articles, or google is bringing up older documents first.<p>When we see a high download count for a gem that still does not indicate that people are using it. It only means people have downloaded it to check out. DOwnload counts are deceiving. Gems that offer a very sketchy description and have NO webpage often get a high download count since that's the only hope of figuring out what it does.

If you want to be a ruby dev, then install linux. On windows you use Visual Studio and .NET

Yup. That's pretty much it. I remember jumping on a Ruby project and having to install 50 (not exaggerating at all) gem dependencies. A handful of them didn't build because of my version of (Ruby|GCC|Rails|OS X|MySQL) and of course nobody else knew how to fix it.<p>I still love Ruby, but now I use it almost exclusively for sysadmin/build type stuff with Rake.

The problem with RoR, isn't RoR. It's the community. I've frankly never seen a worse community to outsiders. Every discussion I've had with them, they end up basically saying, "RoR makes things so easy that over the weekend I reimplemented Google Maps in Outlook Web running Gears of War, with multitouch support -- all HTML6 compliant. And then on Sunday I watched football. MS sucks."<p>But then you begin to peel the onion and you start to realize -- that onion looks kinda similar to this other onion I was using.<p>Don't get me wrong, RoR is good technology. The community oversells it, and the most outspoken are kind of jerks (for some reason the Java, Python, C#, C++, Haskell, Scala, Clojure communities don't seem to have the rudeness or jerkness).

Wow, that's an insanely brilliant thump against Ruby and the community.<p>As a born Rubyist (That is I started programming with Ruby) hopefully this article will get enough traction to make people start looking into having Ruby be as easy as it should be to start with.

I love Rails, and this is still the best summary of the current situation I've seen.<p>I just spent way too much time getting passenger and rvm and rails 2 and 3 to (all) play nice together in a deployment environment, though, so I'm biased.

People always complaining... Too cold in winter, too hot in summer... Too inflexible framework, too much choose in framework... Too boring gf, too hot gf (attracting too much males =))... Too high taxes, too low quality of life... I can continue =)<p>Just shut up and learn/do stuff. Learn/do the way you like it. This is how everything evolve!