About a month ago I was talking about my initial forays into Ruby and RubyOnRails. I’ve sinced written what I consider to be a real (if simple) application and I’m still impressed with Rails. Over the last 5 weeks, I have worked about 40 hours (including database development) on an administration website for the latest project I’m working on. Basically this site will be private to myself and my business partner and will allow us to administer our main website and see how people are using the site. There is nothing too complex about this application. The database contains 7 or 8 tables and there are several simple foreign key relationships. The UI is basic, with no fancy AJAX or anything like that. This is essentially your basic CRUD web application, with a few domain wrinkles thrown in for fun.
Like I said, I continue to be impressed with the speed of development with Rails. I can’t imagine how long it would have taken me to get to this point with Java/Struts/Hibernate. I’m continuing to learn as I go and I plan to build the main website for this project with Rails. Being a public site, this next web application, although going against the same database as the admin site, will have higher demands on the UI and on general application reliability and robustness. This will yet again be a test for myself and Rails to see if we can meet those demands. I’ll let you know how it goes.