With Java, you have nothing, really, to clue somebody in as to what a variable is. There are various notations to get around this, so this will mostly follow whatever convention your business uses.

However PHP, with me coming from a Perl background, is about as ugly as they come, syntax wise. What, exactly is the point of the ‘$’ in PHP? ‘$’ in Perl means scalar or reference (which essentially are the same), ‘@’ means array, and ‘%’ means hash. Meanwhile in PHP, there is no difference between arrays and hashes (perhaps not that confusing, until you try to guess how a half hash, half array data type iterates). With Ruby, CAPITAL_LETTERS means its a constant being defined. $ means the variable is global (no messing with a function or super array to make something global). A variable in_lower_case (often using ada style notation) means it is an instance variable, and will disappear outside the current lexical scope. @@ means the variable is a member of the current object being modified. Saves you five letters out of typing $this->.

The syntax is wonderfully designed. One just needs to understand it. Also, one needs to realize _everything_ in Ruby is an object. Even the number 5. hence code like the following make sense.

# code untested... but a monkey should be able to figure out
# how to fix any syntax errors.
5.times do |x|
   print "Hello from the Ruby World"
end

I’ll now have to check it out some more for sure, and perhaps some other frameworks “inspired by RoR” as well. Might just save a lot of time from reinventing the wheel yet again…

unless there’s some config directive or similar that can override the default behavior.

There is! An example of naming conventions:

class User

Because the classname is User this will look for a table users. But you can set your own table name:

class User

And you can even disable pluralization of classnames for tables or create your own pluralization rules (for another language for example).

But you can save a lot of typing if you use the default behavior.

After having developped my own PHP OO framework I discovered RoR.

RoR just happens to be what RefleXiveCMS (my baby) should have become, only way better and with a language (Ruby) you don’t have to fight with for OO programming.

There is no looking back.

…but as long as you stick to the naming conventions … that Rails is based on, it all just works!

This line was a significant turn off to me. I’m all about naming conventions, coding standards, I sometimes even get caught up deleting tabs in blank lines because I’m just a little OCD. But I don’t like the idea of something’s functionality being dependant on naming conventions, unless there’s some config directive or similar that can override the default behavior.

Other than that, this seems like a very interesting technology. At the very least, it seems like it could crank out business-facing admin interfaces really quickly.

T

RoR ROCKS!

However, I am still not convinced about RoR being more than a hype. I am still having a hard time on the Syntax. And I think more people will have to(sic) same problem.

It *is* more than a hype, and whilst the syntax can be difficult to grasp especially for the more “traditional” coder, it shouldn’t mean the death of the thing.

(Note I am not implying that this is the death of PHP or J2EE either. As many a wise programmer before me has stated; this is another tool for the toolbox)

Ofcourse I couldnot ignore the whole RubyOnRails hype the last few months, so I had a few looks at it. But first looks dazzled me. This post clarifies a lot. Tnx for that ;)

However, I am still not convinced about RoR being more than a hype. I am still having a hard time on the Syntax. And I think more people will have to same problem.

Because I am more used to PHP/Java syntax, I was looking for a little less abstract solution. I found one in a project pretty similar to RoR (for as far as I can see), but still with the ‘easy’ php OO syntax: Symfony