Rails Thoughts Part 3 – A Simple CRUD App
So I read and did most of the examples through chapter 6 of the most excellent Agile Web Development with Rails.
I have now built a simple CRUD app and I cannot believe how easy it was and how little code was involved. You could seriously build a real working, albeit simple, database application in a matter of minutes.
Things I liked:
- Quick startup to a CRUD app
- It is easy to add validation
- It is easy to make changes, such add fields to persisted data, etc.
- Front-end things like paging are built in with ZERO work
- The concept of a dev, test and production database is built into the framework
Things that concern me so far:
- Generated code still scares me, especially if it is code that is likely to be modified.
- Generated code make me feel funny. Will this be maintainable?
- How easy/clean is Rails' i18n support (I haven't bothered look this up in the book or google it, I am sure that I'll find out soon enough)
- Did I mention that generating the code makes me feel a little uneasy?
Most likely my hesitation to generate the scaffolding code comes from years of bad experiences working with generated code, and it is quite likely that using the Rails scaffolding IS indeed maintainable. I'll have to see as I proceed on to more non-trivial things.
One thing I am sure of is that Rails would be fantastic for building prototypes. Man, you could whip something out to show THE BIG IMPORTANT CLIENT in no time. And apparently many folks are making production Real World Usage of Rails, so I would likely consider Rails for building THE REAL THING if all of this experienting pans out.
More next time . . .
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