It all started when I was fed up with developing web applications with PHP or Java (i.e. Struts). I had a rather complex web project ahead and just called it quits with PHP and Java (for web development), because, well, PHP is the shortest path for a web developer to the sanitarium and Struts was simply to cumbersome for my taste. And of course there was Ruby on Rails this super productive new web framework everybody was drooling over, I just had to try it. So I got myself a printout of Rolling with Ruby on Rails to read. And it annoyed me almost from the beginning.

The main reason I didn’t like Rolling with Ruby on Rails is that it praises Rails to the skies while almost completely failing to mention any of the framework’s cool, elegant or productivity-boosting features. The whole article is mainly concerned with scaffolding, a feature which automatically provides a web-based interface for creating, editing, browsing and deleting objects. Its nice to get a first look into the thing, but in my opinion its almost useless for serious development. In my Rails projects, for example, scaffolded code amounts to about 1% (or less) of the overall code, because the application interfaces just don’t have much in common with the interfaces provided by scaffolding.

Yet there are a lot of cool things to tell about Rails: Its domain specific languages, the powerful ActiveRecord framework, its builtin support for AJAXification, to name a few. Rails owes the ease of using these features mainly to the Ruby programming language. So what makes Rails cool are basically the same things that make Ruby cool, applied masterly.

Thus, in the course of this series, I will present the distinctive language features of Ruby that are key for frameworks like Ruby on Rails and made me fall in love with Ruby almost instantly.