Web design is getting more and more complicated and client’s expectations are getting more and more sophisticated. People want both more flashier presentation and more interactivity for their sites. The presentation component calls for Flash or JavaScript effects. The interactivity calls for server side programming. Keeping current is a lot of work if not totally impossible. What’s a fella to do?

The simple answer is learn to program. Even Flash requires programming if you want to build any kind of interactivity into your movies. Great idea but I’m a designer and don’t really know how to program anything. Oh, I can do some simple PHP and JavaScript tricks and more or less know where to look in somebody else’s program to find the HTML part to tweak but that’s about it. If Dreamweaver doesn’t handle my PHP needs I’m basically SOL.

Where to start? As a middle aged HTML jockey I’m not going to go back to college for a computer science degree, so it’s pretty much learn as you go. Obvious, but where to start?

If you keep at all current with the current web buzz you know that Ruby on Rails (RoR) is the wonder child of the year. Twitter and 37 Signals have gotten a lot of press and have put RoR on the map.

But does popular equal good or appropriate? In this case I think the answer is a qualified yes. Ruby on Rails is what’s called an application framework. A framework is a combination of a program to program and formal conventions designed to speed up development time. The idea makes a lot of sense. Much of programming web sites involves doing the same kinds of things over and over, not anybody’s idea of fun. The RoR framework automates many of the repetitive tasks involved in creating an interactive website and greatly speeds up development time. Cool.

Of course, Ruby on Rails is not the only web development framework around. And whether or not it is the best is a subject of debate. But it is popular, and in large part because its creator inventor, David Heinemeier Hansson, is an exceptional salesman, which creates a sort of self-fullfilling prophesy loop. More people are convinced that RoR it the place to be so more people work on the project. With more programmers involved RoR gets more mature and feature rich more quickly.

If you are already comfortable in another language like Python or PHP you might want to look at frameworks written in those languages Django, a Python offering probably fits my immediate goals better than RoR. There are other Python frameworks that bear consideration. I’m just not qualified to judge their quality.

I also took a look at some PHP frameworks. It’s probable that my small knowledge of PHP might save a bit of ramp up time in learning. But two factors influenced my decision to learn Ruby and RoR. The most important is that the tremendous popularity of RoR has influenced a lot of very talented people to write some good books on the framework and on the mother language, Ruby. Programming is enough like mathematics that my experience with calculus probably offers a good preview of what learning Ruby will be like.

Simply put, calculus was hard for me. My brain doesn’t easily follow the kind of logic tracks that it requires. I needed five textbooks, all covering to same material to grasp some of the concepts. Often I just couldn’t understand one author’s explanation and needed another take to clear the mud out of my head. My small experience with programming has been similar. I sometimes need to have the same concept explained multiple times in multiple ways before it becomes clear. Ruby on Rails and Ruby have enough reference material published that I have access to the different explanations that I need. PHP, in general, does but none of the PHP frameworks has anything that I can grok. It’s the same with Python. I would need to spend months getting enough of a foundation under me before I could even begin to grasp the details of Django or it’s competitors that the possibility of bootstrapping myself into productivity this year is virtually zero.

The other reason is simple. Apple will bundle Ruby on Rails into the version of OS X. I’m enough of a fan boy to appreciate that. If another framework like Django or CakePHP were included instead my choice might have been different.

To Date

I tried to get myself ramped up with the first, and most popular, Ruby on Rails book, Agile Web Development with Rails but it was simply over my head. So my venture into Ruby on Rails has been slow.

The learning options a year ago were slim. There were a number of tutorials online. I tried most of them out but they weren’t geared to a novice like me. Like most tutorials they are quick looks into the potentials of RoR but not complete enough for a non-programmer to do more than follow along. That’s not saying that they aren’t valuable, just that I need a more basic and systematic type of instruction. I imagine that real programmers can use them to kick start a real project. Maybe someday…

So to facilitate learning I bought a couple of RoR books. The first was last September, Ruby for Rails by David A. Black. That was still a bit advanced for me, though I look forward to re-examining it shortly. What I can understand seem well written and it gets good reviews.

Finally I found something written to my level, Ruby on Rails for Dummies. It explained some of the terminology that more advanced texts assumed I already knew and it provides a gentle introduction to RoR. It is a good first baby step for the non-programmer into the world of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Another advantage I realized from the Dummies book is that I really needed a basic grounding in programming in general and Ruby in particular. So, I’ve taken a short side trip into Ruby with Learning to Program With Ruby.

More on that soon.

Where am I going with this? What happened was that I changed my major from CS to geology and pretty much forgot about computers for years. The whole process was just too much hard work.

20 years later when, armed with a Mac and happy with computers again, I decided to try my hand at programming once more, I looked at Perl. Perl is certainly different from the Fortran I worked with in the bad old days and without punch cards it was sort of fun to get into.

Perl makes it possible to create interactive web site and programs like shopping cart, but Perl wasn’t designed as a web specific language. Rather it was born as a compilation of Unix administration scripts. As such it is powerful. Unfortunately, as a web programming language it has a lot of baggage.

So from Perl was born PHP, which focused on only on internet specific functionality. Wanting things to be easier I simplified my life by moving from Perl to PHP.

PHP makes it very straightforward to do simple things on the web. But it quickly becomes very complicated to create a more complex application. The progression is more than linear, too. As complexity grows, web apps sprout frighteningly many directories and includes. Not appealing.

Of course, I made the obligatory personal blog and shopping cart applications with PHP/MySQL then pretty much quit bothering. There were smarter people than I and certainly better programmers who were building quality products that I could simply use. This blog is built with Wordress and is so much better than I could have created that it would have been silly to try to roll my own.

And since PHP grew semi-randomly from a base of Perl, which also grew semi-randomly, it is a messy and complicated language, composed of tacked on pieces and parts that was never a joy to use.

Skip ahead a few years and we find that others, much smarter than I, have had the same experiences and done something about it. One in particular, David Heinemeier Hansson, created a set of new web programming protocols called Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails, or RoR or simply Rails was built from the Ruby programming language. Ruby has the advantage over Perl or PHP of being created from scratch as a whole and not duck taped together from bits an pieces. As such it is both easier to learn and more streamlined. I find this highly appealing. As I get older I’m getting both a little slower in my learning ability and a lot less willing to spend the effort to learn something complicated. Yeah, yeah, all programming is complicated but there are degrees.

But what really makes Rails appealing is that its creator, DHH, has a Steve Jobsian like vision of making things elegant (DHH uses the term beautiful), easy to use, and productive. In short it makes the idea of programming fun again the way that my first Mac made computing fun again. Moving from PHP to Rails feels very much like moving from the oppressive world of DOS to the pleasingly sane world of the Mac OS.

The idea is simple, follow Rails conventions and most of the work is taken care of. Things just work – the way a Mac just works. Of course, there is still a learning curve, but it’s one that seems reasonable to an aging HTML jockey.

I have a couple of web applications that I’ve been thinking of making. Before it just seemed like too much work, especially since they are specialized and would appeal to a small audience. It just wasn’t worth the effort to write a program for myself. Obviously, I’m not a programmer at heart. There is no joy of creating applications to scratch an itch. Programming is a tool that requires a lot of skill and time to master and to keep current with. Rails just may make the effort required to create personal applications small enough to be worth my time. It’s certainly interesting enough on its own for me to give it a serious learning effort.