On the Rails Hype Cycle

I found this interesting graph on a blog entry about the Technology Hype Cycle.

The diagram is interesting and made me think about my current Rails experience. Each time I code and do something, I really enjoy myself. A side question is ... am I allowed to enjoy myself whilst coding? Past experience in most Java frameworks has been defined more by pain than "enjoyment". I digress.

Two days ago a new rails book I ordered from Amazon arrived(Simply Rails 2 - by Patrick Lenz). I was frothing with anticipation. Even though I have only read the first few chapters and I haven't really learned anything that I didn't already know, yet I am still frothing.

I think that I am still on the way to reach the peak of Inflated Expectations. I just hope that when the Trough of Disillusionment sets in that it won't be so bad. I guess live it up now.

I am really enjoying Rails!

Well for a freelance project, I decided to use Ruby On Rails. I have heard the hype. Seen developers at work use it ... blah etc.

After mixing tutorials for Rails 1.2 and Rails 2.0 (There are not that many for 2.0) I actually managed to code something quite easily. I was quite surprised. I think that the scaffolding thing is just awesome. I even "rewrote" my small app a few times as I learnt to do it better. I think the telling thing was that I wrote the app in Rails 2.1.0. Once I uploaded it to my server I was having it hosted on, I realised that they only offered Rails 2.0.2. I rewrote it again. I even managed to figure out how to various rails versions on my local machine and use the version I wanted. Very cool.

Some helpful Rails 2.0 tutorials:


I did this all on my mac. I installed Mamp to get MySql and I eventually settled on textmate as editor as my machine just did not have enough grunt to use Eclipse.

The really great thing is that I am enjoying it. There are some things that have been frustrating, but this has been way easier to learn than say Spring/Hibernate combo.