My first Ruby on Rails application

After the interesting keynote (aptly named “Dynamic languages for statically typed minds”) by Niclas Nilsson at the ReMIX event in Stockholm last week, I decided to give Ruby a try.

I’ve also been curious about the Ruby on Rails framework, so that’s where I started. I downloaded the Instant Rails solution, unzipped it and a few seconds later I had a full-blown apache/mysql/ruby runtime, without any installation needed. Great start!

After that, I opened up the 182-page book Ruby on Rails: Up and Running and started programming straight away. It’s so easy, although I haven’t made it past chapter 2 yet. But man it is nice not having to hit Ctrl-Shift-B every time I make a change to my code. I’ll keep you posted on my findings along the way.

Ps. One thing that I’m confused about is how you dynamically can make a class’ private methods public from another class just like that. Good for unit testing, sure… but it seems rather insecure, doesn’t it? I mean, coders make methods private for a reason. Ds.