Ruby on Rails

[tifosi]

Think of expanding my skillset. Don't want to go down the windows/.net route so looking at Ruby to complement OOP PHP.

Anyone else using it? Any decent online resources you know of?

Thanks

 

[DaveLeeds]

Although very basic (initially), the free courses over at codeschool could start to set you on your way.

That site doesn't seem to fair well with safari - ipad. It keeps closing it.

 

[martin-s]

http://teamtreehouse.com/

 

[murph]

I'm about to have a big project coded in RoR. Any thoughts against this as platform of choice?

 

[murph]

It's pretty easy and quick to get something that looks commercial quality with RoR and for that reason there's a lot of people out there offering to build your software for £100. Beware though, just because something looks right, doesn't mean it is, poorly written code could destroy your business before it even starts. Are you using a programmer you know or one of these sites where you post your requirements and lots of Asian and Eastern European 'coders' bid peanuts?

A freelancer in UK, although not committed yet. I have had a hard time trying to find one. Originally looked at Laravel, fuelphp and CI too.

 

[tifosi]

As a UK freelancer I can certainly go with the 'issue' of Asian & Eastern Europeans (India especially where there are hubs around Kerala & Mumbai). A lot of them - from experience - are fairly large set ups and have a specialist team involved in simply quoting for jobs. I'm not saying their code is bad, some definately is, a lot isn't. There are a lot of skilled web people out there, finding them among the dross is the issue.

I'm seeing though a lot of jobs in PPH for example being posted with 'UK developers only' and then quoting ridiculously low budgets (at Asian levels) which work out at well below minimum wage. Suffice to say they get few UK quotes and a lot of 'you must be joking' or 'are you sure you don't want Indians'.

Lost count of the number of invitations from people on PPH where I've simply declined their offer. The best one was a couple of weeks ago where someone wanted a clone of Etsy and when I asked the budget said ~£200.

Seem to be picking up smaller integration jobs for design agencies without the technical skills atm not full jobs... which often just don't get awarded anywhere when reality of budget kicks in.

I'm certainly not averse to using them for my own projects and I know of UK web design companies who outsource their dev work to India. Sort of a moral grey area imo but sound business I suppose.

The Ruby thing is just an idea. PHP/MySQL/jQuery etc is still the core work.

S

 

[tifosi]

Are there no PHP frameworks that have copied (for want of a better word) RoR?

I'm sure there are. The original set of PHP MVC frameworks that started springing up 2006+ were all in part based on the ideas of RoR as well as PHP's emerging OOP capabilities.

Current interest isn't for a project, just curiosity. I've got a codeschool account so will probably start there. Most of spare learing time is more towards jQuery 1.8+ and the UI capabilities. Surprising how many 'minor' site change jobs end up being almost all jQuery, especially WP based ones.

Dev work is still PHP/MySQL. I'd still go for CI as a goto though ones like Lavarel are more cutting edge 5.3+ based and gaining popularity.

S