During the last few weeks, I found myself more and more inside a stream that takes me to Ruby on Rails, when it comes to the best platform option for agile web development. My current language and platform or proficiency are C# and ASP.NET MVC, however, while getting introduced to the Rails world, I started seeing things from a different perspective, as well as finding out such great tools and practices that I really would like to have when working with ASP.NET MVC. I’m gonna list some the topics and differences I have been analyzing:

  1. Community support: I found the RoR and the Open Source community to be far more unite and open to teaching and sharing knowledge than the .NET community. Starting with the assumption that there are probably more people working with ASP.NET right now than with RoR, it is surprising to see that it is easier to find RoR help online and learning communities than ASP.NET ones. Also, as far as I know, the ASP.NET MVC code is not open to community contributions right now, so people created the MvcContrib project to acoomodate this code, which is a shame. This is said, despite the fact that it’s under the MS-PL license, I found it hard to provide suggestions and feedback to the project, since there is not an official place for it.

  2. Productivity: Frequently I have hard times fighting the framework just to be able to get the job done. Rails has proven to me to be more productive and succint in terms of framework design. For example: named routes and database migrations are VERY helpful and I miss this kind of tool in ASP.NET MVC.

  3. Tight Model integration: I see many people argue that ASP.NET MVC is just VC, since the Model is not tightly coupled to the project. It’s the developer’s task to choose the right tool for the job, be it LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework or even MongoDB, for example. This flexibility is useful, however, a more integrated scenario could improve productivity a lot, perhaps we could use Entity Framework and SQL Server by default and change the provider later, if needed.

  4. Dynamic typing: This is a more subjective item, since it is wrong to say that static typing is worse that dynamic typing, or vice versa. It is just a matter of choosing the right tool. However, It seems to me that, in general, static typing and compilation doesn’t free you from actual real world errors. It is a cost/benefit tradeoff, so, IMHO, the productivity benefit you get with dynamic typing is worth the trade for the static typing checks that you lost.

Wrapping up, I think that Ruby on Rails is still an emerging technology that has a great future ahead and an incredible supporting community. I’m seeing daily more and more events, talks and conferences around this technology. This, summed up to all the points argumented above, makes me believe that at least it is worth learning. And this is what I’m working on right now.

(I think I’ll have to buy a MacBook soon :)