Not more than two months ago I started programming in Ruby. Ofcourse using the rails framework. It was superb for me to find that just everything about web development is already there in the framework. The directory structure - it’s just so easy and you intuitively find whatever you need, logging - it has that useful feature to tell you the performance of your business logic as well as the performance of rendering the view. Ruby on Rails clearly MVC based. Working with and refactoring of your DB is an ease with the help of migrations. You’ve heard about Web 2.0 - yes, AJAX is well incorporated into the rails, too. I still haven’t found a missing part.

Why a Developer but not a Coder? Well, you should feel the beauty to develop in Rails. For me a CODER is someone who concentrates on code structure and thinks about how to CODE down the business logic for his problem. The Coder is also highly considering the difficulties for accessing his DB. What’s the contrast in case of using Ruby on Rails. Just after a little experience, you don’t code down - you write down whatever you need. Moreover you are not scared to think about adding new functionality related to DB Objects - you just tell rails that you want it. All this ease lets you think on a higher level and lets you concentrate on the real problems that should be solved.

Well, if we have a ladder for our programming skills - first we are just coders. We think over small peaces of code and functionality. It’s difficult for us to see the whole picture. We need more experience to achieve that and to climb up to the next step - DEVELOPER. With more skills and experience the developer easily sees the whole picture. It’s easy for him to solve real problems. He just concentrates on what to be done. OK, let’s take for example programming and developing web applications in Java. It’s so sweeping. There’s hundreds of technologies and each of them is so different in configuration and implementation. Yes, you can build great things! However, before becoming a real developer of java web applications you fist should devote hours of coding and learning lots of different technologies. Sometimes your head can explode of information. I know it from my own experience. Let’s take PHP for web development. It’s so easy to create a simple or more complex dynamic web page. However it lets you write ugly code, moreover every programmer has his own standard of programming. I think that years of experience with PHP are necessary before being able to write professional web applications. Here it comes Ruby and Rails and the ladder for programmer skills. The period in which you are considered as just a Coder is far less than that with Java. With a little experience of Rails and learning of Ruby lang you can concentrate on real problems without any problems. Your head don’t have to explode before connecting two different technologies - they are all incorporated in the rails framework and are waiting for you. Yes, in a short period of time you can become a developer of real world web applications.

It could look like a marketing campaign, however it’s just the truth. Believe me. For web development I have experience with Perl, PHP, Java and with Ruby on Rails now. Neither of the first three have made me feel so comfortable as Rails has. With rails I just feel myself developing a web applications not coding. Cheers