I’ve spent a very illuminating couple of days getting acquainted with Ruby on Rails. Net Resources has recently started a Ruby on Rails training course and I got a chance to sit in on one of them and learn a bit more about the framework that’s got everyone talking.

Let me just preface this by saying that I’m no hardcore developer. I know enough PHP to make me dangerous and I can bluff my way through the rest. My interest in Rails was really analysing it from the perspective of implementing it as a new platform for my developers. And what I saw was very encouraging indeed.

We started with a demonstration of how to get Rails up and running. I’ve heard that this could be quite tricky, involving installing several components in parallel. We took the easy route and opted for Instant Rails: a package of Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. This was much simpler than I had imagined, and within minutes we were up and running.

From there we ran through the standard Blog in 15 minutes, and it’s fascinating to see how the concept of scaffolding can allow for the rapid deployment of core functionality in minutes. Creating a new application instantly gives you a series of ready made components, actions and controllers and a templating system pre-built in. As a designer this aspect really got my attention because I could see how easily it would be for developers to begin creating background functionality of the site while designers worked independently on the front end. Integrating the two is then a piece of cake.

Now, there’s no point me debating the comparative merits of Ruby on Rails vs PHP or any other language because I simply don’t know enough about programming to give a truly educated opinion, however I can judge from the perspective of someone who has to manage fairly large projects and a team of developers.

Even though I’ve only scratched the surface, what impressed me most about Rails was the speed at which a working prototype could be created from scratch, complete with testing suite. It just seemed like you get so much “for free” with rails compared with many other systems I’ve used. It’s also simple enough so that even stupid designers like me can work within the framework, so the claim that rails slashes development time seems reasonable enough.

We’ve got a medium sized project coming up that seems like a perfect fit for this type of framework, so I think we’re going to give it a go and see what happens. I daresay I’ll post my thoughts in due time.

In the meantime I’d be really interested to hear from any other designers, who’ve had to start working with Rails. What were you’re experiences like?