Ruby on Rails (How Easy?)

[comfixit]

I am new to the concept of Ruby on Rails, but familiar with a variety of web development scripting languages such as ASP, PHP, CFML.

From skimming the web I gather that Ruby on Rails allows you to structure your information in a certain way so that the scripting language can do allot of work for you?

Is this accurate?

If you wanted to create a simple 5 page mostly static web site, how usefull would Ruby on Rails be for something like that?

Is Ruby on Rails only usefull when developing larger scale apps or can simple one page web apps be deployed rather easily?

Why isn't there a PHP on rails (or is there?)

Thanks for the help, trying to decide if I should make the plunge and try and learn Ruby on Rails.

[xmitchx]

There are PHP lbraries out there that attempt to clone the way rails works but they're mostly ineffective just because Ruby has some interested language characteristics that allow a lot of "magic" to happen

Sure it'd be very easy to create a 5 page "mostly" static website:

rails MyApp
script/generate controller page_one
...

Then just go to page_one:

class PageOneController < ApplicationController
  # Add any actions... none are needed for an index though, so if its just static you dont need any
end

Go to views/page_one and create index.rhtml and add your content.

It sounds long but really, you dont' even have to deal with the content being served at all, jsut fill in the page at index.rhtml.

[comfixit]

I checked out a little more info on RoR. From what I gather the Scaffolding function makes it pretty automatic to get DB lists, create, delete, update etc.. without much coding.

Aside from Scaffolding what are some of the other major advantages that draw people to RoR?

[IAIHMB]

Convention over configuration and DRY (Do not repeat yourself.).

[vgarcia]

I checked out a little more info on RoR. From what I gather the Scaffolding function makes it pretty automatic to get DB lists, create, delete, update etc.. without much coding.

Aside from Scaffolding what are some of the other major advantages that draw people to RoR?

The Ruby language is very intuitive to use, there are tons of helpers/libraries/modules already written that you can download and work into your app easily, unit testing and functional testing of your app is built into the framework and not difficult to use, and there are probably more reasons I'm forgetting or that other people prefer more

[samsm]

If you wanted to create a simple 5 page mostly static web site, how usefull would Ruby on Rails be for something like that?

I bet you could make that whole site with Rails in the time it would take you to decide whether you should or not.

[xmitchx]

Less! You could make the whole site in probably an hour max.

[MiiJaySung]

Rails has lots of extras that are specific to web development. for example DB migrations / project deployment via switch tower, paging helpers, validation helpers, filters etc

[davro]

Personally this book Agile Web Development with Rails has proven very useful.