Rails Challenges

Introduction

The past three weeks of development have presented many interesting obstacles that have require creative thinking in order to overcome the challenges. One of the obstacles I have faced is understanding the Rails convention on naming things and how this effects Rails behavior. Understanding the underlying Rails architecture has also been challenging to understand.

Rails naming convention and architecture

Rails aims at a framework that is geared towards development rather than the configuration of the underlying architecture required in order to successfully deploy a web application. Something referred to in Rails references often is "Convention over Configuration." This applies to many aspects of rails including the way things are name within programs. Specifically, when a user requests a web page, Rails uses it's routing infrastructure to determine where to send a user when a given URL is requested. These URL's generally, refer to specific actions in the Controller class of the rails framework. The controller does whatever it needs to which is generally creating instance variables of the various Models that will be used in the View of the web application. This view corresponds to one of the actions in the Controller and so their names correspond.

Conclussion

Rails is indeed a powerful framework for developing dynamic web content. In general, it does most of the heavy lifting in terms of generating a raw skeleton to work with. This, in theory, allows the developer to worry about higher level features and functionality rather than configuring Apache servers etc. The disadvantage to go the Rails way is that it can be potentially slow going in the early stages because of the learning curve associated with learning Rails convention and architecture.