You guys are lucky. I had a torturous time playing with RoR. I had a week to learn it in and just couldn't get a hang of all the automatic things it did being a guy who likes to know exactly why some thing works. Not surprising considering RoR is not just a different language but also a different way of describing what you are building. I resorted to Perl and had better luck.
I've been using rails a bit over the past month, month and half and just now getting a little comfortable with it. I still slightly prefer PHP because even though it comes out ugly and takes more work, I atleast know what every single line of code is doing. Rails has a lot of "magic" which makes things easier but at the same time hides a lot of things from a developer.
Sometimes people can become overly fixated on what's hidden from them. You say you prefer PHP, but when was the last time you looked at the source code for any of the myriad extensions? Can you explain how mod_php works within apache?
Whilst I do think that it's good to have a broad view of how things fit together, knowing what every line of code is doing says to me that you are either working on incredibly trivial code, and/or you're not using existing, well-tested libraries as much as you could be.
I've been using RoR for over a year, professionally for about 7 months and my best advice (it's also been mentioned in other threads) is to learn Ruby first. If you get to know Ruby pretty well, it's much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Agreed... The hardest thing is to cast of the PHPisms and Java patterns that you may be used to, a lot of Rails is idiomatic Ruby code, so really knowing Ruby makes it a lot easier to understand.
I haven't used Rails yet in a real project, but I'm a bit worried about the same thing. I've actually shied away from using Django (I'm a Python guy mostly) since they have a bit more magic involved. TurboGears/Pylons/Web.py makes me happiest so far.
The nice thing about these web frameworks is that it makes rapid prototyping easy, and in doing so, it does things which may seem "magical". I would recommend that one should gain a certain level of understanding of what's going on behind the scenes. In doing so, it won't be as "magical" after all.
'... would recommend that one should gain a certain level of understanding of what's going on behind the scenes ...'
The upside of this is you work less & do things faster because there is a lot of functionality pre-built. Solutions become a lot simpler because you are utilising more of the framework, less custom code leaving more time to solve the real problems.
I've tried a couple frameworks and for everything they make easier, they make something else harder. There's a learning curve, so your first stab with any framework is actually likely to be slower than using something simple.
