WARNING: This blog post is about nerd stuff. If such things frighten or offend, I would advise you to look away now.
RUBY ON RAILS: So for a long time I’ve been programming for the web exclusively with PHP, MySQL, Javascript and Jquery. While the latter three are fast becoming THE standard web technologies PHP has in the past few years gained competition in the forms of Ruby and Python. Lately, as I’ve completed work on Blue Ribbon Design, I’ve been thinking of the advantages of acquiring new technical know-how. So I decided it was time to branch out from PHP and try my hands at something new.
I was excited now. It had been some time since I last flexed my brain muscles to learn a new programming language. But which one? After hearing so much raving about Ruby as a language that is “designed to make programmers happy”, I was keen to try it out (something about Python, seemed a bit ugly to me).
Getting into the basics of Ruby was really very simple, and after only a day learning the syntax, constructs and basic ideas I could see that the language would definitely appeal to me. But once I tried to get a development environment setup with Ruby On Rails things got fraught with errors and general Stuff Not Working Like It Was Supposed To. After losing an entire day fiddling with command line prompts (I’m a PC guy and thus the command line is foreign to me!), I discovered that Ruby is not really made for smooth Windows compatibility. Its all about Unix-y and Mac-ish. There were some Windows installers but it didn’t fix anything.
At this point I kind-of despaired. I really liked what I’d seen of Ruby! But I didn’t have the money to switch to a Mac (though I do wish to make that leap sooner rather than later) just to try out a new language, and switching my whole setup to a linux/unix system also seemed somewhat drastic given my needs.
So for two weeks afterwards I dabbled an hour here, an hour there, frustrated by my failure to get a practical development environment operational. I even installed a dual-boot of Ubuntu Linux, but quickly saw that getting setup with my design tools from Windows (i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator etc) & the Apache / MySQL stack I was used, was going to be a serious headache.
Along the way I discovered this pretty brilliant piece of software called VirtualBox. Its basically a virtual machine, in which you can run other operating systems from within your current system (i.e. Now I could run Ubuntu Linux from within my normal Windows XP setup). Wow! Sadly, this didn’t actually lead to a working Rails development environment.
And there the Rails experiment has died for me. Though after seeing how elegantly Ruby is structured, I’m keen to keep a track of the Windows Rail Deployment tools, and hopefully get up and running with Rails at some point soon.
Expression Engine. In other Nerd News: after quite extensive experience with using ModX, WordPress and custom built backends to create content interfaces for clients, I’ve switched on my latest job to Expression Engine. I’ve found it both liberating and frustrating, though I feel my frustration is more just the inefficiency of the beginner (its never nice learning to crawl all over again, when you can do triple-flips in a different CMS!). In terms of the client-facing interface, Expression Engine is very useful in its capacity to tailor and hone down the screens to only what is required by the website owner. On the other hand, trying to stick within the native EE tags can be a bit of a nightmare, but I feel once I get my head around the paradigm of the system the power/logic will start to leap out at me, much the same as it did with PHP and Jquery.
LESS Pre-compiler. One amazing tool I’ve discovered recently (and am kicking myself I hadn’t discovered earlier) is the CSS pre-compiler LESS. Basically it provides a (much-needed) overhaul of the standard CSS syntax and structure, allowing you to take advantage of the standard structural features of programming languages like nesting, variables and functions. Its amazing how much more powerful stylesheets become when so much of the repetitive leg-work gets abstracted, especially when it comes the proprietary CSS3 browser declarations floating about.
Alright, well that about summarises my nerd adventures of late. I promise a good chunk of music, design, art, prose and misc topics for awhile, before returning to nerd-dom.
