DISQUS

Building Browsergames: Adding Stats (Ruby on Rails)

  • JohnMunsch · 9 months ago
    That's a tough one for me because I have no PHP experience and I don't think Luke has any Rails experience. I know that given a choice of Java vs. Rails for web development I would recommend Rails hands down (and in fact I moved one of my own sites from one to the other), but that's probably not much help for you.

    One thing I could recommend is that if you find that you learn well from video resources that you look at some of the instruction made available by Railscasts.com (free) and PeepCode.com (small fees per video). There are also some introductory screencasts available at RubyonRails.com. Perhaps you could watch some material on both and see if one appeals more than the other. Alternatively perhaps flipping through some books might help. Simply Rails 2.0 might give you something you could compare against a good starting book for CakePHP.
  • Luke · 9 months ago
    I actually do have a very slight amount of Rails experience - although by
    now that experience might as well be nothing.
    Personally, I would recommend Django - have you already unconsidered it?
    Python is super-intuitive and easy to learn for new and experienced
    programmers, and the indentation-based scoping makes it so that Python code
    is a lot easier to read than the more brace-happy languages.

    When I *was* working with Rails, one book that I found indispensable was
    Agile Web Development with Rails - it was a great walkthrough on getting up
    and running with Rails(and if I remember correctly, it had an appendix that
    taught you enough Ruby to understand what you were actually doing).

    Personally, I would recommend against using PHP - while there are definitely
    arguments *for* it, there are enough arguments against it that you should
    probably steer clear. Using a PHP framework like CakePHP or CodeIgniter
    might change that(I'm afraid I haven't tried one yet), but in my experience
    PHP tends to almost encourage you to write poor, shoddy code. I'm not saying
    that's all you can write - but if you want to build things seriously, you
    will need to be a lot more careful with PHP in order to write good,
    maintainable code.