My little Rails
project at work is starting to wind down finally. Ive been heads-down
on this thing for almost a week, but it seems to be worth itI have a
nice UI around my database, along with a clean schema to replace the
hacked-up one from the previous design. I have 8 models, 9 controllers,
and 40-some views. Including tests and documentation, I currently have 90 files open in xemacs
, a personal record.
Of the 4 days Ive spent on this, at least one full day was lost to
bugs in Rails that I had to find workarounds for. Probably another day
was spent searching for examples and documentation on specific Rails
features and generally learning how the system fits together. The
remaining two days were divided between database/code design (there are
some weird controller issues for this application) and HTML design.
Its been years since I last threw together anything more complex then
a Movable Type theme, so my web-design skills were years out of date.
All things considered, 4 days doesnt strike me as amazingly fast
for this project, but I doubt that I could have been much faster using
any other framework. The big thing thats impressed me with Rails is
the amount of polish that Ive been able to put into this in a very
small amount of timethings like pagination and live searching were
nearly trivial to implement. With a bit of practice, I suspect that I
could churn out similarly-complex applications in a little over a day,
and that would be just astounding.