Developing without migration?

Rails
1

I found sometimes developing without migration could be faster than with
migration, especially for a personal project and a new developer. I know
migration could bring lots of good things during development. But as a
green rails developer, I have to spend extra time on how migration works
and how to roll back to a previous version, etc. such jobs are not
important for a fresh new project or fresh new developer.

I would say, setup database using any GUI tool could be easier for new
rails developers, these developers are supposed to be familiar with at
least one kind of database. Based on my experiences, the first inception
could not be fully considered, so, frequent modification could happen. A
GUI tool is more efficient than migration at this stage. It may save
huge time and energy.

Time is expensive, rather than spending time on learn how to let
migration work, spending on coding could be better.

My idea could be wrong, but I believe it could be somehow helpful to
freshly new rails developers.

2

It really is worth learning migrations. It’s very easy once you know
basic syntax and you’ll really thank yourself for doing it once you
get going on a sizeable application.

I’d also argue that new developers should start using best practices
from the start. This includes using migrations, testing, version
control etc. If you start using these things right away, you’ll be a
far better developer - even if it means a few growing pains.

Steve

3

Hey Surf,

I considered the same decision when I started with Rails a year ago.
Migrations are totally worth learning, even for a beginner on simple
projects. In development, you’ll find you end up changing the DB a
lot… and these are a lifesaver.

In terms of populating the your database with test data, I found that
the “best practice” way of using YAML fixtures was actually not so hot
for my applications. It can be very time consuming if you have lots of
foreign keys. To go along with Migrate, I ended up building something
custom called Populate that helps you fill your database with test
data (it has steps just like migration does).

-Pete

4

On 2/22/07, Surfman J. [email protected] wrote:

I found sometimes developing without migration could be faster than with
migration, especially for a personal project and a new developer. I know
migration could bring lots of good things during development. But as a
green rails developer, I have to spend extra time on how migration works
and how to roll back to a previous version, etc. such jobs are not
important for a fresh new project or fresh new developer.

When things are too hard, we cheat.

The migrations cheat sheet: http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/migrations

rake remigrate: Organize Your Models — err.the_blog

They really are quite simple. G’luck.

–
Chris W.

5

Good day!
I am also a freshly green rails developer, but I didn’t find it
difficult to learn how migrations work.
script/generate migration (and script/generate model does that
automatically), write a create table with more concise and beautiful
Ruby syntax rather than clumsy SQL (Okay, GUI is faster but I have to
launch another app while here I can do everything from TextMate), rake
migrate — and there’s no step three!
Remember, you have to spend extra time on how migration works and how
to roll back to a previous version, etc. only once, and then you can
easily use it!
The same with unit testing — one can probably write simple Rails
applications without unit tests more quickly, but when the tasks grow
in size and complexity, you’ll certainly gain benefit if you have
learnt to write test cases.

Yours sincerely,
Damian/Three-eyed Fish