I am officially a passenger aboard the Rails Train. Honestly, when I started with Rails I didn’t really see the “magic” happening. I had been happy with what I could build in Sinatra. I loved my Sinatra App, and for some reason every aspect of Sinatra just made sense to me.
Enter Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails is Sinatra on steriods. There was SO much going on in even a small app that I was terrified. I didn’t understand the routes file, or how rails “automagically” knew to look for a certain view based on the route and action name. It made no sense. Sinatra made sense. Sinatra wouldn’t do anything unless I specifically coded it to do so.
So yes, you could say at first my experience aboard the Rails Train was terrifying. I felt like the train ride would never end and that I would just continously be moving forward never actually piecing the stops together. Eventually, I got there though. I started to appreaciate how smart Rails really is. I loved how easy it was to type resources :users and have all my restful routes already created for me.
Enter Rails Project.
This project was a beast of an obstacle. Trying to incorporate Omniauth and Devise are no easy tasks. After failing to implement Devise, I decided to create my own user authentication with Bcrypt instead. While Devise has so much capability, I honestly felt as though it was counterintuitive for such a small app. It reminded me of some of the lessons with scaffolding and some of the generators were explained. It’s great, and it does a lot for you, but with a small app it almost does too much. I also liked still manually being able to create my user authentication as opposed to using Devise to do it for me.
Another big bump I hit while riding the Rails train was with Omniauth. I decided to opt for using Google instead of Facebook to challenge myself to use a different provider. It was tough at times, and I had to google about Google a lot to figure out how to get it to work correctly, but it was totally worth it after I was able to log into MY APP using MY GOOGLE ACCOUNT.
At the end of the day, I would say the Rails Train was definitely a little scary, but well worth the ride.