Posted in ruby Two+ Years Working with Rails

Update: I thought I should give a little background on how I got started with Rails - when I was attending the SDWest conference in March 2006. I was at the Jolt Awards, and saw @d2h receive the award for the best web development tool for Rails 1.0. I downloaded Rails that night in the hotel room and was hooked.

This week marks the two year anniversary when I delivered my first professional Rails app. Today, I decided to take a look back at the code of that first project and see what’s improved over the past two years. The result - not bad, but there were a couple areas that stood out. Here are a few:

1. The controllers in that first project were out of control. Not sure why, maybe coming from the J2EE world, my first instinct was to cram everything into the controller. It was apparent that the concept of REST wasn’t completely baked into my brain yet. Not to mention the concept of fat models, skinny controllers.
2. Second, the views and Javascripts were a bit unorganized. I noticed excessive conditional logic and messy Javascript code in a few of the pages. If I was to re-write the app today, most of it could be cleanup with rendering partials with collections and using Low Pro to clean up the Javascript.
3. Finally, the sheer lack of plugins for that first project was surprising. It’s true that the amount and quality of plugins have grown in two years, but I believe the lack of awareness was the main cause.

So this made me think of what I would say if I were to advise newcomers writing their first Rails app. I would have to say first, if you find yourself writing code in the controller, then ask yourself “Can I put this logic in the model?”. And also be sure to familiarize yourself with the available plugins with sites such as Agile Web Development and Github. They can save you a ton of work.