Well, I finally did it. Starting on Friday afternoon I endeavored to take Ruby and Rails on a test drive to see if I could use it to make a little web app for my own personal use. I should note that I had no prior Ruby or Rails experience nor experience with using the Google Maps API but I am quite the Java ninja, if I do say so myself.

So I spent Friday afternoon working through the cookbook example app, and then beginning on my own app. I worked on it intermittantly over the weekend, but mainly I spent my time cleaning my house.

By Monday night I had probably spent about 6-7 hours on the app, and I had a web app that would connect and submit a search query form on a website and parse the web page response that was an HTML page with a table of data. It would then pull some data out of the table, with one of those peices of data being an address, and put it into database locally. The web app would then present that search result in the form of a google map.

I was pretty impressed with myself. I was also slightly impressed with Ruby and Rails. There were definitely several times where I had to fight the anger of knowing exactly how to do something in Java but having no clue how to do it in Ruby. I did find the easy use of regular expressions in Ruby superior to that in Java. That made parsing the web responses quite simple. I can also tell that my little rinky dink app that I have now is built in a good enough way to turn it into a much more powerful app quite simply. I believe it is the Rails framework that has made it easy to make a prototype that is built easily on a good foundation that I won’t have to throw much of it away to make a more powerful, polished prototype.

Anyways, it was a good experience, and I will definitely consider using Ruby on Rails again for my future web app needs. I’m looking forward to having a look at some books so I can see what things I did incorrectly in my unlearned novicehood.