Thanksgiving 2008: What We’re Thankful For (In Rails)

Noel Rappin, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 @ 3:16 pm

Penguin Harvest by wednesday181

Since it's Thanksgiving and all, I asked our Rails developers to briefly mention something in Rails that they are thankful for. You'll notice some common threads -- nobody consulted with anybody else as far as I know.

Anthony Caliendo

I'm thankful for the "convention over configuration" mindset, as it saves me so much time and removes all the plumbing and wiring I needed to do when developing java apps just to get it running.

Jason Sendelbach

I am thankful that Ruby on Rails has conventions and code that reads like prose. Because of this, I can join an existing project and be an effective resource immediately. If I am fixing a bug, I simply look at the URL to figure out where to start. If the code is good (most of the code in Models and Helpers and not in the Controller), there are few bugs (did I mention the code was generated with TDD) and I can quickly start coding without much overview from any of the other developers. The entire project and code is self explaining. There is almost zero ramp up time. Thanks Rails (and Ruby).

Josh Symonds

Definately ActiveRecord. Particularly associations and association methods, and named scopes (because they feel like association methods but on one model).

Sharad Jain

I am sure ActiveRecord is the crownjewel. Outside of that, support for testing (unit, funcational) and supporting classes inside of rails are great.
Standardization of how libraries are installed (gems, plugins) etc. and convention of configuration in general is also something that I am thankful for.

Karthik Muthupalaniappan

I think the best thing for me about Rails is it lets me worry only about how I should/can code a functional requirement of an application by taking care of most of the other configurational/operational aspects of the application

John McCaffrey

Thorough implementation of Regular expressions throughout ruby and rails.

Noel Rappin

I get to go last, so I won't repeat anybody else...

I honestly love the ActiveSupport library, with all its 2.days.ago and 10.kilobytes and even array.second. I'm thankful for the attitude encapsulated by all these methods -- "if I needed to this, a lot of other people probably will, and I want to make sure they don't have to write it again". It's DRY at the community level, and it's part of what makes working in Rails so satisfying.

Have a great holiday weekend, everybody. Thanks to all of you that read and comment.

Related posts:

1. acts_without_database: Now a Rails Plugin
2. 2008: A Year That Was
3. Rails Performance, Code Metrics, and Locking Down your Application: Tips & Tricks from Windy City Rails 2008
4. RailsConf 2008: A Belated Look Back
5. A Java Programmer’s transition to Ruby on Rails

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