I’ve been working with Rails for the last week or so now. I’ve loved ruby since the first time I saw it, but I never got the chance to play around with rails. I’ve got too many PHP projects out there.

I finally got the chance to change that last week on a test port of some existing ASP.Net software. The existing codebase is a bit of a nightmare, mainly due to the type of programming that ASP.Net requires. All of the abstractions just feel wrong to me like there’s this great mass of people who just don’t really get what the web is all about. It’s really showing it’s roots. I love linq, and I love C# with the .Net library, but that ASP.Net crap has to curl up and die.

Anyway, back to rails. I’ve been coding PHP pages and sites for years now and I’m really comfortable with the language. So much so that I didn’t want to lose the advantages that experience bring with it. Because of that was using MVC frameworks built in PHP (Code Igniter is the best that I found out there).

I should have changed a lot sooner.

I’m just blazing thorugh the code base. My PHP skills are helping rather than hindering. The abstractions actually make sense.

I like it.

I’m not a fanboy yet (there are many places where rails would be far too heavyweight) but I do like it a lot.