An excellent Ruby on Rails cheatsheet
Posted by Curt Hibbs Sun, 09 Jan 2005 08:00:00 GMT
Blaine Kendall has created a Ruby on Rails Cheatsheet that you can download. It’s hardly a “sheet”, already weighing in at 14 pages, but it is very well done and has already earned a spot in my personal Quick-Reference folder.
I also liked what he had to say about how a long project start-up time can kill the ability to even get started:
When coding in Java, I’d get an idea in my head, start brainstorming about how it would work then I’d start setting up my work environment at home.
* Create a new directory structure for the project.
* I’m going to need logging – get the latest log4j jars.
* Get JUnit for unit testing and include in project.
* Get Hibernate for database persistence. Configure the hibernate files.
* Get a templating project (Spring/Velocity/etc – take time to decide on which one) and add to project.
* Do I want to use Struts for this too?
* Assemble all the other jars I’ll need.
* Setup a new project and configuration in my IDE.
* Setup database connections and test that out.
* Etc, etc, etc.
By the time I even start to write one line of code, it’s usually taken me until 2 evenings later, as I’ve got a day job and these ideas are meant as fun nighttime projects. By this point, the excitement of the idea is lost and the project gets shelved along with the others as something more important has usually come along or interrupted me enough to get in my way.
With Ruby On Rails, it’s a much different story. Within 5 minutes of sitting at my computer, I can be up and running with a complete environment, database configuration and blank template pages already showing me some results. Hours vs minutes makes a lot of difference. Just getting the project started is much faster, not to mention the amount of code required to do comparable tasks.
