Last week I posted that I had started tinkering with Rails. I thought I'd blog about my experiences with Rails, having only 1 week of experience with it.
Firstly, I haven't had all that much free time to play with Rails. I've only managed to squeak in an hour or so, here and there. But that's a testament to the productivity I have found with Rails. In other words, I've only spent a handful of hours over the last week working with Rails, but in that short amount of time, I've made some significant accomplishments.
I decided that a web-log application would be real-world enough to get a good feel for Rails and simple enough that I wouldn't get bogged down in the details of the project itself. In about 15 minutes, I developed a simple web-log application where I can add/edit/delete web-log entries. In roughly another 30-45 minutes, I had added categorization. In 15 minutes more, I had a working RSS feed. And after another hour, I had added enough security so that regular visitors can only read blog entries, but I (after being authenticated) can add/edit/delete them.
The only thing keeping this app from being complete is that it doesn't support comments yet. I'm guessing that it's only going to take me about 30 minutes to add that in.
I should also mention that this whole thing would've gone a lot faster had I not documented every single step I took so that I can recreate it in a tutorial later (watch this space).
And, although I agree that lines-of-code is not the best metric to judge productivity, I thought you might like to know that my app has only 52 lines of Ruby code in Ruby class files and another 31 lines of Ruby sprinkled in my view files (yeah, it's scriptlet code, but...what are you gonna do?).
To sum it up, my Rails experience has been positive. I look forward to playing with this framework more (as time allows).
