I’ve heard a lot about Ruby on Rails over the last couple of years but I’d never really been intrigued to get it set up on my machine and 'have a play' with it so to speak.

It turned out to be a relatively painless process and after following the instructions on the official site I had it all setup within about half an hour which was a record for me for getting a development environment setup. With a bit of help from the Pragmatic Programmers Guide to Ruby I managed to get some basic pages setup. The design of the URLs and the separation of the code is actually fairly intuitive. Ruby on Rails uses the MVC (Model - View - Controller) Architecture/Design Pattern very strictly and the code for each of these is written in a separate file.

One aspect of this that made sense to me as a PHP programmer was the way that the URLs in Ruby on Rails are constructed in a "/[controller_name]/[action]" format. I also like the fact that everything in Ruby on Rails is an object, even such things as integers and strings. It takes a bit of getting used to but after using it for a bit it seems counter intuitive to do it any other way.

I don’t think I’m about to become an advocate for the use of Ruby on Rails for every development project I work on - I’m still a big fan of C# and the .NET platform and I find it unlikely that I’ll change my mind in the near future but we shall see!