Workshop 8 (Engin Sahinel)

1. The three strengths of Ruby on Rails workshop series are;

• I could find out MVC design;
• I could gain basic level experience on building a web site for e-commerce;
• I could find out importance of team work and ruby on rails which is the easiest and fastest way to develop a web site, through these workshop series.

2. The three weaknesses of Ruby on Rails workshop series are;

• All workshop questions required too much documentation;
• Sharing our experiences part was helpful but it would not be must.
• Due to scripting language disadvantages, I spent too much time to find out my mistakes while i was developing.

3. The most difficult aspects were:

Finding out expected results of the workshop questions and learning a new scripting language was quite difficult for me. I wish to learn a new generation web site programming language such as, PHP or ASP.

4. Improvements I would make include:

At the beginning, a well designed tutorial should be prepared for beginners. For example, it can include how to install and configure software then how to develop a program using its API. In addition, instead of too basic examples, we should work on real world applications.

5. Comments for Web framework used in these workshops;

As I stated above, I prefer to study on mostly used web frameworks like J2EE and .NET, rather than Rails framework. In addition, instead of 8 workshops, 1 or 2 big real life projects that should run on the other popular web frameworks, can be assigned to us. Because when we look for a job, we can meet the industry requirements.

6. Comments on other tools to facilitate collaboration

I was studying as a developer after workshop 4. During this semester, we used google group, It provided to discuss on our problems and let us to share our positive or negative experiences. However, except our lecturer, there were no experienced person about Ruby on Rails applications. For that reason, usually we needed to get his help and when I got trouble during my developing processes, I asked to him directly or researched on google books.

7. Further comments to add?

In my opinion, social networking should not be as a marking criteria. In conclusion, although I have some concerns about web framework, I am happy to learn new programming language and web programming techniques. I want to thank Peter for his patience and help.