Looking Over THE Fence

Posted by Kresimir Bojcic on March 22, 2009 Leave a commentComments Go to comments

I’ve written small application that is supposed to help customers organize things related to the state of their street lights system. Street LightsCustomer usually beeing a city department. If you want to check it out username and password is test/test. One word of caution – it’s in Croatian. I think you can figure it out. It’s written in ASP.NET. Since it was a freelance deal I’ve tried to minimize development time and thus I cutted a lot of corners. (It was a mutual agreement so I’ve charged a lot less, it’s not like it was a rip off or anything). I’ve used subsonic (a bit tuned up to support user roles for scaffold grids – if someone wants this, send me an e-mail, be aware that it’s not the latest subsonic available), I’ve used bread crumbs that good friend of mine wrote ages before it was available in ASP.NET (it was still better than the one that shipped with ASP.NET last time I checked). I’ve also used existing .css templates since I am terrible at design. (Like you couldn’t tell that from my blog?) I have a decent knowledge in ASP.NET, C# and .NET in general. With all this head start I’ve slapped this together rellativly fast. I’am not too happy with the code, but it works decently.

This Rails thing is bugging me a lot lately. Since I am sick and tired of examples that I’ve seen so far I decided to port real project (small one of course) and see where will it get me.

Things that are scaring me are :

1. Will I loose time on things that I would figure out in .NET in a second?
2. Hosting - I’ve read terrible things about that, and I have GoDaddy hosting (I know, not a smart thing for ROR)
3. How much will I have to change database (It’s build for subsonic from the beginning but not all of it, I have two or three “custom” forms)
4. Where will I find time to do this?

I will go against the mainstream and use Linux – I thing I’ll stick with NetBeans since I am new to ROR, and auto-complete will help me out a lot. Also I am more comfortable in IDE, contrary to my previous post about magic being lost by using auto-complete.

I’ll write about my experience/problems/victories. Any help would be appreciated (where to host, what to read, how to jump over hurdles that I’ll encounter…)

Also I’ll post code snippets, so you can make fun of me while being out of my comfort zone.

Ruby on Rails, ,
  • Rocky
    Aaaadriiiiaaaaannnn!!!
  • Krešimir Bojčić
    Hubert, thanks for the comment. It's my first comment ever so it is that much more special :)

    I agree with you and I plan to throw it all away once that I am done. Still I think that best way of getting a grasp of things is by doing something "real" as opposed to yet another blog engine, or digg clone. It did those guides that you've mentioned and I have a couple of books about Rails. I'am big fan of refactoring so I think I might do ok after a while... but who knows...
  • Hubert Lepicki
    Oh, I have had the experience that you shouldn't learn Ruby/Rails by building application that will actually be used by anyone except YOU.

    Chances are low that you won't make too much mistakes, and bring habits from your previous technology (say ASP) that won't fit into Rails way of doing things.

    Usually, you'll end up with non-standard, hard to read and understand code.

    There is one excepthin, however - you might want to be paired with some more experienced programmer that'll introduce you to world of Ruby / Rails.

    If you are looking for information - get a book like "Rails for .NET developers", and visit http://guides.rubyonrails.org.
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