Rory Hansen

There has been so much hype lately on the Internet about Ruby and, specifically, the Ruby on Rails development framework. People just GUSH about how easy and how fast it is to develop web applications.

In any case, yesterday I decided that I wanted to see what all the hype was about and experience Ruby firsthand. As a programmer with experience developing using a number of web scripting languages, I figured picking up a new language couldn’t hurt. Plus, if developing web apps is as fast and easy as people say, then all the better. One interesting feature that I’m looking forward to is that the URLs used throughout Ruby on Rails applications look so user-friendly. No more question marks and ampersands; with Ruby it’s all about the easy-to-read and easy-to-understand directory structure-style query strings.

So far, I’ve installed Ruby and have started up the WEBrick web server to ensure that the installation works. But I’ve yet to write a line of code. I figured I’d get this blog up and running first so that I could detail my experiences with Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR) as they happen.

Oh, and to maintain my interest in learning the Ruby language, I’ve _forced_ myself to learn by already signing up for a web hosting plan. Since most hosts don’t seem to offer support for FastCGI or the Ruby on Rails framework, I’ve signed up with TextDrive (the official Ruby host) on their $12/month plan. Hopefully, this will keep me on task and start developing some web apps.