Alex Le’s Blog

{{http://alexle.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/rails.png }}It’s been a week since I started messing with Ruby on Rails seriously. My current Rails project is rebuilding Wars of Earth, the game that my friend Giao and I started almost a year and a half ago. Since Rails is so flexible and powerful, within a span of a few days (like 5 days), I was able to achieve as much as 2 weeks worth of work compared to the past. Before, as Giao is much better at programming than I am, I asked him do the framework design in PHP (we used Pear’s DB_DataObject, Smarty, and home-grown controller for a MVC architecture.) I did the design (game designs, coming up with ideas, some coding) instead as well as preparing the site in Joomla (check it out [[http://www.warsofearth.com|here]]). Nonetheless, I was getting ready to graduate, and my buddy had to take on freelance work to make some money, I decided to put Wars of Earth aside and focus on what mattered most at the time (mainly job and money). As I have more free time on my own now, I am restarting the Woe project but this time, I am rebuilding it from scratch using Rails. And I don’t think I would go back to PHP for any web-based project if I don’t have to.

The major bottle-neck between Giao and I, as I would boldly claim for any other projects that involved geographically distributed team, was the communications. Giao is still back in Vietnam, and I’m in Chicago. I’m 12 hours behind him. Whatever we needed to do, we put in TOTO tasks and message in our Basecamp site. At the time I haven’t thought too thoroughly about the story and the game play, so we just kept on moving until we hit a problem, then we would sit down and talk. But words can only describe so much. Sometimes what I tried to get across, or what my buddy tried to tell me, just failed to get both of us on the same page. Giao would implemented something and it was not the same as I thought, so we just kept on building, discussing, and sadly, compromising. Moreover, I constantly having more ideas for the project, creating our eternal scope-creep: I just tried to add many features right at once (I was trying to get it right the first time, but of course it was almost impossible)

Now with Rails, things are much different. Rails are so flexible and powerful that what I only need to put down is mostly business logic, not low-level, database accessing code. The syntax of Ruby is much superior to that of Perl (I hated Perl with passion, and still do) and Rails is plainly a joy to use. Suddenly I realize the meaning of the [[http://www.loudthinking.com|blog]] of [[http://www.loudthinking.com/about/|David H. Hasson]], Rails’ creator, “**Loud Thinking**.” With Ruby, you can actually __think out loud__ through your code. Since Ruby’s syntax is so flexible, it allows the user to write the code in an unheard-of conversational way. I can almost read the code as I would read a novel (since reading code requires some imagination and the code is no longer boring in Ruby, so I can’t compare the program with a textbook - that would be too boring don’t you think?). I don’t have to restrain myself to the curly braces of C#/Java/PHP style, instead I can tell the Model to fetch all the record then smash the id’s in to an array with some logic in one line. Something like CharacteUnit.get_all_units().collect{|unit| unit.id unless unit.is_inactive} and of course you can add a lot more to that as you can stack as many operators/methods as possible. Pure programming joy.

One interesting part about Rails is the testing tool: unit test and functional test. I can’t wait until I setup the first functional test for the application to simulate a web user. And of course the best part is: everything comes in an elegant, well-thought, scalability-proven web framework that took you 10 minutes to get started. Suddenly the barrier to entry to mid/ large-scale web projects is dropped significantly (it’s __free__ now, only costs you your opportunity cost). In stead of just WYSIWYG, it’s now **What-You-Think-Is-What-You-Can-Get**, **WYTIWYCG** (weet-tee-wic). Imagination goes wild, how awesome.

Whomever I talk to nowadays, I can’t stop talking non-stop about Ruby on Rails. I feel good sharing it to anyone I know so they can start feeling the same way as I do, as sharing is caring.

I feel good. Do you?