First Impressions

So, the book I bought is "Agile Web Development With Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson, and as of this post, I'm in the middle of chapter 8.

The biggest thing that has struck me at this point is how similar this is to what I do on a daily basis with ColdFusion. Rails is an MVC framework, as is Mach-II. Rails uses ActiveRecord as an ORM, and I use Transfer. I haven't found an equivilent for ColdSpring- a dependency injection framework- but I could just be missing it.

More to the point, the basic makeup of Rails is very familiar. The basic URL structure of http://domain.com/controller/action is similar to the more familiar (to me) http://domain.com/?event=eventName. In both cases, you are specifying an event (or "Action" as this book refers to it), and a controller reacts to that event.

In other words, I'm not learning something new, I'm learning a new take on something familiar. Funny how a new take on something familiar help you learn more about the new *and* the old, isn't it?

Rails uses WEBrick, Mongrel, or Lighttpd as web servers- and I'm sure that Apache can be put in the mix there somewhere. Still familiar- I'm used to Apache or IIS fronting for JRun.

So there's a lot that is conceptually the same between what I'm used to and what I'm learning. Just to keep posts somewhat focused, I'll save the initial differences for the next post.