Welcome to Rails. Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View. David Heinemeier Hansson extracted Ruby on Rails from his work on the project management tool Basecamp at the web application company also called Basecamp.

Ext JS with Rails. Two weeks ago, I had the awesome opportunity to spend a day at Hashrocket’s office. Hashrocket is a consultancy company from Jacksonville, FL, specializing in Ruby on Rails software development. It is led by Ruby on Rails community well- know and book author Obie Fernandez. Thanks to their open nature and their utilities such as presentations, posts, tweets and videos, I already knew a lot about “The Hashrocket Way”. I must say though that I didn’t really believe in some of their techniques and practices, mostly because I haven’t tried them out. Only a few sections are Ruby on Rails specific.

To give you a quick impression on how my day at Hashrocket started, look at the following picture. This is actually the way to work of some of the Hashrocket developers. That’s hard to beat. It’s a short kick- off meeting for the day. We talked a little about who’s going to work on what, about a few technical things from the day before, I introduced myself to Hashrocket’s people and Hashrocket’s project manager Sal assigned me Matt Remsik as my pair programming partner for the day. More on that later.

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Let’s get started with Hashrocket’s way versus My way .. Always pairing vs. Occasional pairing Hashrocket is a (maybe the only) well- known coding shop that practices full- time pair programming . Most of the time though, a developer should embrace his flows (between the pairing sessions) and get things done. Ideally, the other developer gets other things done during the same time. Summed up, this would suggest to be a faster technique for moving forward with software development. Ish don’t think so anymore.

At least, I don’t believe anymore that it’s that easy to calculate. The reason is that I was pretty surprised on how often me and my pair Matt Remsikcalled on each other's action.

With called I’m referring to giving ideas, suggesting better solutions, correcting and optimizing code. Unfortunately, I don’t have a pair at my side right now to test pairing over a longer period of time.

Pairing locally vs. Pairing remotely Today, a lot of people work together remotely such as me with my peer Samuel Goebert . Somehow I had in my mind that pairing locally means sharing one keyboard, one (small) screen and rolling around with chairs. Therefore, remote pairing has been a clear winner for me, since both peers can easily access their keyboard, their screen and don't need to roll around when switching sides.

He made an interesting point by saying that they felt a big difference between working on two separate or one screen. He said one screen helps to communicate since you also can take the other ones gestures in account. So, basically, you can easier notice where the other one is looking or pointing at. Working in an open office vs.

Working in a quite room. My opinion was that it makes more sense to put each pair in a separate room. Especially if you have multiple pairs in a room (instead of single developers), it can get a little noisy as you can sometimes tell from Hashrocket's videos . I assumed that a lot of pairs in one room is worse in respect of higher distraction rate than a lot of single developers in one room. It turned out to be the other way.

Noise (conversations, videos, sounds) from other teams feel less distracting in a room with pairs than in a room of single developers. To explain that, Matt told me about a very interesting cocktail hour theory, which is that when talking at a bar or cocktail party to someone, you can concentrate on that conversation fine even though there's a lot of noise from other people and music in the background. The cool thing about your ear and brain is, that it still can filter interesting bits of information out of that background noise. So if somebody at that party mentions a movie or a place you just have seen or visited, you can catch that up and decide if you want to join that conversion or not. The same counts for the office. If somebody for example mentions Rails on Google App Engine or a specific problem when upgrading to Rails 2.

Most of the times so, the other pairs are talking about their current code and task, which doesn't interest and therefore distract you from your conversation with your pair, and pair programming is a lot about conversation. Working in an office vs. Working at home I’m often wondering about what gives a lonely freelancer the ultimate satisfaction and highest productivity while working. I unfortunately haven’t tried sharing office space with other freelancer yet, though. Hashrocket actually makes you feel a lot like you’re a freelancer and sharing office space with others. That’s definitely a big plus and eventually helps satisfaction and productivity.

Sometimes I wouldn’t mind to get out and breath a little office atmosphere. Textmate At the stand up meeting in the morning I mentioned that I’m using Textmate as my editor for Rails projects. Gestures of some attendees let me know that I’m old- school (or new- school?). Anyway, it turned out that Hashrocket’s editor of choice is Vim (with a rails.

Tim Pope). I could see the advantages such as vertical split screen (i. German Keyboard I’m German and I have been using German keyboards throughout my life time. What a flaw! Svn I'm (still) using Subversion for my source code version control for internal projects. I noticed the git storm through my internet connection and I have been using git for a few open source projects of mine.

Especially its simplicity and usability. In git, you can do the same things in 5 different ways.

In Subversion there’s practically only one command for each action. Maybe these two points are not technically correct, it’s just my feeling. Also, I somehow like to have a linear and non- manipulated history. Subversion makes sure of that. After all, it’s not Subversion’s fault, they just didn’t know about the svn switch command.

No need to specify revisions by hand when merging anymore. Also, since version 1. Subversion allows relative remote paths. After all, I don’t want to claim that I’ll never end up with using git someday.

One thing that sometimes bothers me about Subversion are slow merges. So speed may sell git for me, as for many others I guess, too.

In the next chapter Their RSpec practices vs. My RSpec practices I discuss one git- ish workflow they follow, which wouldn’t be possible with Subversion.

They also have a wildcard email account that accepts emails in the following format prog. Their RSpec practices vs. Hp Scanjet 5590 Silent Install Command there. My RSpec practices For model and controller testing, Hashrocket uses RSpec. So do I, too. I stopped using it since it got kind of annoying. I’m wondering sometimes if I should just put the new context for let’s say a new method at the end of the spec file.

My pair, Matt Remsik, sorts them the same as the methods are defined in the corresponding model or controller file. This may especially helpful when you have split screen as I mentioned in the previous Vim vs. Textmate section. Matt Remsik agreed on that one, too. One argument from Hashrocket was, though, that their continuous integration tool is checking every commit, therefore, every commit should be working code, even in branches.

I agree with that on the master branch, but myself likes to be able to commit to development branches non- working code. That’s actually why I belief you split the development of bigger features into branches. Prototype (vs. Ext Core) I remember, some time ago Hashrocket switched from Prototype JS to j.

Query. Hashrocket’s boss Obie mentioned it in this blog post . Whatever, this blog post is worth a look, since it has the same style but different content.)Unfortunately, I forgot to talk about their experience with j. Query and reasons for the switch. Looks like I have to visit them again. It will definitely be my choice of lightweight Javascript lib for future projects, since I like Ext’s API and clean code and am familiar with it from the Ext JS lib. Cucumber- based GUI testing vs.

Ruby on Rails vs PHP – The good, the bad. Note – this article was written in 2. I’ve added an addendum to update the article with latest thoughts on May 3. I’ve been developing with PHP since version 2 (a very long time ago). I had been wanting to get into Ruby on Rails and had played with it since version 1 but never had the chance to really use it in production seriously until this past year with Ballistiq.

Since then, I’m now coding 8. Ruby on Rails and PHP, so I’ll give my thoughts on the two. At the time of writing, the versions I’ll be talking about are PHP 5. PHP 5. 4 and Ruby on Rails 3. Ruby 1. 9. 3). The context of this post is comparing the two specifically for web development. Aren’t you comparing apples to oranges? Yes. Rails is a framework for Ruby.

PHP is a language and has many frameworks. What I’m mostly comparing is my experiences working with both ecosystems: PHP + framework (there are many) vs Ruby + Rails (the predominant framework). While some may get hung up over trying to compare the two and may balk at the title of the article, this is a legitimate question that many developers ask. Many developers want to know what are the benefits/shortcomings of both ecosystems and genuinely just want a clear answer.

From the popularity of the article via Google, it’s something that tens of thousands of people actually are asking. Isn’t it just a preference?

Yes and no. Both the PHP and Ruby ecosystem are very powerful. In many cases, yes you can just boil it down to a preference.

However, there are many strengths for both and it’s useful to be able to compare them in a level- headed fashion. I’m not religiously attached to one or another. I’ve used both. My company works with both. Both are here to stay and play important roles in the global web development industry. PHP – The Good. Simplicity and Learning Curve.

What I absolutely love about PHP is its simplicity and relatively shallow learning curve. When you first get into PHP, all you need is a single HTML web page. Change the extension to . Throw in some < ? PHP, run it on a PHP web server and off you go. It’s really dead simple for someone totally fresh to get something usable done and deployed within a few minutes.

This has been one of the strengths of PHP and why it’s so darn popular — designers and non- coders can be productive right away. This simplicity, however, comes at a cost. It is a double edged sword as it leads to a lot of sloppy, unmaintainable code.

This leads people to use frameworks that force a particular coding standard. The benefit of PHP’s simplicity and shallow learning curve is a really big thing going for it and this has business benefits too: it’s easier to find people who know PHP. If you look around, Ruby on Rails developers are more expensive and harder to find.

The good developers who really know Ruby and Rails (the L3. T) tend to be more hardcore devs. The documentation for PHP is also fantastic. I find the docs for PHP far more useful than the ones for Ruby and the Rails Guides.

The user comments really help and there is a lot of example code that shows you how to solve common problems. It’s Made For The Web. One big thing about PHP is that it really is focused entirely for the web.

It’s not a general purpose programming language like Ruby (or Python/Java/C/Perl/etc.). Many of its inbuilt functions are specific to solving web problems and this makes it a very straightforward language to program for the web. An MD5 or SHA1 hash is simply md. It’s not as straightforward to do this with Ruby/Rails as you have to load in libraries and use namespaces/modules to get to the same functions. Lot’s of Resources. PHP has a ton of resources, frameworks, applications and libraries available for it.

From CMS’ like Word. Press and Drupal to frameworks like Symfony and libraries like Doctrine, PHP really has a lot of good resources available. When it comes to deploying a simple CMS, for example, I almost always default to just using Word. Press instead of building a Rails app for it. I just feel that it’s a much simpler solution.

Dead Simple to Deploy. Deploying PHP is dead simple. At its simplest, you just FTP the files to a web server (which we at Ballistiq never do – we deploy using Git). Thing is, with PHP you don’t have to know about or care necessarily about the web stack. Many hosting services just use a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, My. SQL, PHP), so as long as your files are in place they just run and that’s that. Even using a framework like Code.

Igniter is relatively simple as you don’t ever need to use the command line — you just copy the entire framework directory onto the server and run. That’s it. PHP – The Bad.

Its Evolution Led to a Lot of Bad Code. This is not a direct feature flaw of PHP, but is the result of years and years of building on top of a simple scripting language that was specific to solving simple web problems.

PHP was not always Object Oriented. Even when it did support OOP, for years it was not really OOP (missing important features like static methods), so programmers got around the problems through all kinds of shenanigans like using global variables or setting a local variable using a global reference pointer. E. g. Typical pre- PHP5 code//Ex.

Using global variable to get reference to database handler. Post($post. It’s unfortunate but is just one of the side effects of working with a language that has evolved rapidly. One thing that drives us crazy at Ballistiq is going into projects where we have to upgrade or maintain applications written with old PHP.

This is the case with one of our largest projects where we’re trying to upgrade a large app written in PHP4 code and it is horrific. A lot of sloppy code there that we have to work with.

Better Coding Standards Lead To Really Purist Code. As mentioned above, sloppy code is not an inherent feature flaw of PHP. It’s just how people have used the language. As PHP has gotten more popular, it’s gotten a lot of influence from enterprise developers who take a really purist approach to programming. When you go to conferences and listen to these PHP experts talking about best practices, PHP no longer becomes fun to program. You’re almost looking at a Java program. Classes explicitly declare namespaces, importing namespaces, explicit getter and setter methods, explicit declaration of public/private methods, etc.

The code becomes extremely verbose. Now If you want to see a framework that takes a more purist approach to things, check out Symfony. It’s a great PHP framework that’s ready for enterprise level usage but from a development point of view, I find it tedious. Ruby on Rails – The Good. Mature Framework. The more I develop on Rails, the more I really appreciate and love it.

I’ve found that it enables us to create higher quality products for clients much faster, that are more maintainable. It’s a mature and stable framework that many large companies are comfortable with introducing into their environments. Compare this with the PHP ecosystem that has many frameworks — there’s a risk of selecting a framework and finding that it’s just not that well supported several years from now (we made this mistake). Speed and Development Joy. I absolutely love working with Rails because as a development platform, it is extremely automated.

So many menial tasks have been automated so that you just focus entirely on solving the business problem instead of hacking your way around a framework. Some things really going for Rails in this regard are: Generators/Scaffolding – Provide a very good starting point for developing around. Some PHP frameworks now provide scaffolding features.

Gems/Plugins – the Rails community provides a wealth of plugins as Ruby Gems that you simply add to your project Gemfile and install. This significantly accelerates development and maintenance time as you’re not trying to integrate disparate libraries, it’s already done for you. Active Record ORM – Of all the ORM’s I have used (for PHP I’ve used Data. Mapper DMZ, Fuel/Kohana, Doctrine), Active.