Rails Rocks
codeclimber.blogspot.com
codeclimber.blogspot.com
Color me wrong, but I hate posts like this, just not cool.
Welcome! You are going to enjoy frameworks! They are really cool!
Those of us who don't have the time to try out so many new things would appreciate an essay on the subject of "why I, as a brand-new user, found Rails so much more fun than Django or .Net". If nothing else, it would be fun to have an iota of actual evidence that I can cite when I'm patting myself on the back for having chosen Ruby and Rails over the others.
Don't become cynical right away. The framework community is awash in cynics at the moment. There's a backlash, dontcha know, because folks are aghast that after three whole years of hard work Fred Brooks is still right: Rails and Django and CakePHP haven't made web programming as easy as sneezing. It's still just web programming. You type, and you type some more, and you get a brief glimpse of joy, and then you fire up IE 6.0, and you burst into tears. Some things never change.
See? Working too hard at the coal face can make me cynical too. So for god's sake have some fun and be proud of having fun. We could all use some enthusiasm!
"Welcome! You'll find that you'll enjoy using frameworks; they are really great."
Or
"Once you're done learning the basics you should try out my Project X extension which does Y and Z and is scalable and only costs $19.95 from my startup. Help me pay the rent! :)"
Or, at the very least,
"I hate all existing frameworks. After you use them for a while you will encounter problems Foo and Bar, for which the solution is to adopt Parrot on Parade, the new meta-meta-framework that I invented last week."
Sneering at new users is not cool. I'm sure you didn't really mean to do that. It's just my cable modem acting up again.
That said, the story is scoring well. I blame premature upvoting and the lack of vote take-backs.
In addition, Rails has also helped explode Ruby as a language. This is what pg should be doing for lisp, creating an easy to use, elegant framework built upon lisp. I haven't tried Arc yet, but I hope all the developers take a few cues from DHH and Rails.
;P
In my case, I prefer django.
Um, what?
My advice is to watch a few Peepcode screencasts (I gotta start collecting affiliate fees from that guy, I drop his name so much) and just pick a method and start. Don't get too obsessed with exactly which flavor of the testing religion you are adopting; play around with it a while. RSpec is as good a place to start as any, although you should obviously know enough about Test::Unit to read and recognize other people's vanilla unit tests.
I'd be sure to try autotest with whatever else you use, though, because it's fun to get the dynamic feedback.
You can learn way, way too much about Rails testing by reading Jay Fields' blog. There was also some useful stuff on the Thoughtbot blog, back when I was actually paying attention.
After doing RSpec for a while, writing with Test::Unit seemed really clunky and annoying, especially when reading tests.
I don't use the new Story stuff in RSpec. That seems geared more toward non-programmers who spec things out to be coded by others.
Writing tests is like writing anything else: you can write shitty tests in Test::Unit or RSpec. Neither one will necessarily help you to write good, short, idempotent tests, which is the really important part.