[Ruby] Greetings from Alaska

[James Moore]

> -----Original Message-----
> > I'm finding Ruby very easy to pick up but Rails is a bit different than
> > ASP.NET.  In ASP.NET the elements on a web page are treated as objects.

(Caveat - I'm no .NET expert, and I've got more experience with client-side
.NET than the web stuff.)

In Ruby on Rails, there's nothing even remotely like that concept.

ASP.NET wants you to create lots of objects in a structure that looks
something like HTML, and then you interact with those objects.  The html
page and the C# code get compiled into one piece of code, ASP.NET hacks
together something that's supposed to look vaguely like an event queue when
a request comes in, you do stuff based on those events, and then the system
generates HTML based on the state of all the objects associated with that
page.  You end up grovelling through the file system looking for the
intermediate files that the comiler spits out (it turns the html you've got
into C# code that's somewhat human-readable) so you can figure out what in
the world the system has built for you.  It's like the good old days when
you had the C compiler spit out assembler so you could figure out what was
really going to happen.  And you end up with these sketches of what events
happen and where they go that will drive you up the wall.  Interesting
concept, but the complexity just becomes annoying without being useful.

Nothing much like this happens in Rails.  You can put Ruby into an HTML
page, and that Ruby will be run eventually, but it's very straightforward
"run this code as you're processing the HTML on the page."  The whole event
model doesn't have a rails counterpart.  You won't miss it. 

 - James Moore