I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning the newest, shiny, whizbang/neato intraweb framework around, Ruby on Rails. Now, mind you, my entire site is running on PHP, and I’ve been programming in it since 1999, however, there’s some big problems with using it. It is possible to use it correctly, however, the path-of-least-resistance is to use it incorrectly. The big thing that didn’t even realize was a drawback is that all of the SQL is buried in the PHP code itself. The Ruby on Rails MVC model makes it easy to separate the SQL from the Ruby. So, development is very agile and adaptable. This allows you to make changing the database by adding tables or fields to an existing table very quick and painless. I’m currently using WordPress and Gallery, however, there’s all kinds of naughty braindead code that I hate in these CMS systems. I really want to roll my own system because I’m stubborn and idiotic like that. Add to the fact that I’m severely unimpressed with Gallery2. Google freaking released an RSS plugin in their summer of code jamboree, and the gallery folks haven’t put it in the release yet. I looked at adding it myself, but the Gallery2 tables don’t have a “LastUpdated” field in the album title, and guess what it’s coded in? You got it, PHP. So, good luck finding every freaking query that refers to an album in all the core Gallery2 PHP and all of the plugins.

The other thing that I’m really digging is the script.aculo.us stuff and the Prototype Javascript library. It makes it ridiculously easy to make it look like you know what your doing with Javascript. I have a test page up and running now using some of this stuff, however, it’s mostly useless, but keep your eyes peeled as I’ll probably be making Involution.com 7.0 completely run on Rails in the near future.