I now have about 3 hours of Rails experience! Installation was a breeze, Hello World a no brainer. I followed the “Rolling with Ruby on Rails” tutorial (part I, part II), and I think I can see now why they say you can be very productive with Rails.

Things are still mingled in my mind, but what knowledge I have gained so far follows: Rails enforces the model view controller design, has a strict directory structure and utilizes special naming (e.g. a DB table called tasks and a class called Task are connected). One nice thing is that data lists and CRUD operations (create, retrieve, update, delete) are completely automated (scaffolding) for simple objects (no joins etc).

All these seem a bit restrictive at first and I don’t know what happens if you want to do things differently (though I guess it can be done). But the consequence of these rules is that you can do things extremely fast. Building a simple application (e.g. a phonebook application) can be done in a few hours. You don’t have to build any infrastructure, as this is exactly what Rails provide.

I still have a constant feeling that it can’t be used for “advanced” applications, even though I understand I am mistaken (Basecamp and Backpack are advanced enough).

I will continue experimenting with Rails because:
a) It’s fun
b) It’s different
c) I want to understand it better, so I know what people are talking about
d) I want to see how it integrates with AJAX