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RAD with Ruby
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Dec 06, 2004 07:35 AM
from the i'm-big-in-japan dept.
from the i'm-big-in-japan dept.
Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby,
an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you
are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a
professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
"
"
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Ruby Rules! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ruby will be easy for any Perl user to learn, and it really is OO from the bottom up, not just bolted on like Perl's so-called OO.
And Ruby's OO makes much more sense than Java's and Python's OO. I can't explain it, but I can't think OO in Java or Python, and I can in Ruby.
Re:Ruby Rules! (Score:4, Funny)
You dare badmouth Perl on Slashdot?! Take this! s/(12^\n)monkeychar6969BakerStreet(monkey(gibbon(
Parent
Re:Ruby Rules! (Score:3, Informative)
Example?
not half as consistent as Smalltalk
(so you agree that Ruby is more consistent than Python?)
Smalltalk has no form of MI, has it? At least not in the original version. That may be consistent, but it's not practical at times...
But does it work on Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But does it work on Windows? (Score:3, Informative)
Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows [rubyforge.org]
With Ruby, there are even classes that let you do OLE automation.
And calling C/C++ functions is super-easy using Ruby so you can use all those DLL functions out there.
Re:But does it work on Windows? (Score:2)
Re:But does it work on Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell is this crap?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is this crap?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the hell is this crap?! (Score:2)
I know my friend they've been quite rare this days... However, for spelling's sake, you should use plural
Where's [where is] (Score:3, Insightful)
No, actually, he's correct. However, for grammar's sake, you should go back to school.
(e.g. "I know, my friend. They've been quite rare, these days.")
Re:Where's [where is] (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What the hell is this crap?! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is known as "Star Wars Syndrome". It's the delusion that the content used to be good, when in reality, the sufferer was just less discriminating.
Parent
Why Ruby? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps an example would be best.
http://www.rubyonrails.org/show/AccessControlLi
NOTE: In the above example, the Model Code (just a handfule of lines) is what creates all the database-mapped classes and relationships. In other words, the implementation of functions used in the Example Usage were created on the fly!
If you haven't done enough object-relational mapping using other languages to be blown away by this example, then here are 37 other reasons:
http://hypermetrics.com/ruby37.html
Ruby Home
http://www.ruby-lang.org/
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:2)
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:2)
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:2)
Second, hypermetrics.com doesn't work.
Third, you didn't use <a>.
You're making me work too hard!!
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:2)
What is the Ruby equivalent of CPAN and why isn't it on this guys list?
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:2)
Next question: at the front page of that site I can't query the available packages. What gives? Is there a search function that is web accessible? (like search.cpan.org) For example, one nice Perl module I recently started using is MIME::Lite. How can I easily find out if there is a Ruby equivalent to this module?
I've read about Ruby and am eager to try, but CPAN isn't just important to me--it is perhaps the only reason I use Perl.
Not trying to be a pain: I know I can google for this stuf
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the advantages of learning new languages, even though they may not get used professionally, is the ideas and metaphors that come with the language. Each language was designed to solve a problem, and almost every
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you put some actual thought into the queries you make, you can do much better. For example, what you'd really like to do is see what permissions the user has. So:
Re:Why Ruby? (Score:4, Interesting)
To someone who uses SQL frequently, the code I gave is obvious. (It'd be even more so if slashdot allowed me to indent it properly.) And most people making code to access a RDBMS will have used SQL recently, because they just designed a schema to access. The tool doesn't do that for you.
With object-relational tools, you need to know more than you did before. There's much more complexity and bloat in the system. And the resulting SQL is crap. There's no benefit.
More accurately, "premature micro-optimization is the root of all evil". You will save a lot of effort by choosing an efficient high-level design right away. Passing around objects that tie you to an object-relational tool like this one is not an efficient high-level design.
Yes, that particular piece of Ruby code would cause an unacceptable bottleneck. In many organizations (including mine), the database server and the webserver are not the same. Imagine every round trip taking 50ms and you'll begin to understand. The number of round trips must be O(1) for acceptable performance, and the closer to 1, the better. That's not true for the Ruby code. It makes m + n round trips, where m is the number of roles for that user, and n is the number of permissions for that user. So if that's 20 (depending on how granular permissions are, that's not unlikely), that will add a second per hit. Ugh.
In part. But mostly, it doesn't make sense to add on layers of complexity unless they accomplish something for you. This layer does not, and it does take away your performance.
Parent
Short version... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all the news in there. I really don't understand why the submitter chose to include a whole bunch of Python vs Ruby links. The actual news bit isn't about that at all...
Cooper
--
I don't need a pass to pass this pass
- Groo The Wanderer -
Re:Short version... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the Python vs. Ruby soapbox: I think it'a a valid component of the news because the two languages are fighting for mindshare in the same pool of savvy OO-script developers.
Without getting into particulars, I must say I've been through Perl, then Python, and now Ruby, and I'm most satisfied with Ruby. Sadly, Ruby folks seem to be so busy doing cool things that they are just awful at evangelizing their language. The language a little bit younger and less polished than Python, but they're catching up fast. The inclusion in KDE is an indication of this progress.
Parent
Re:Short version... (Score:4, Funny)
Really? It seems to me that all the ruby people do is evangelizing their language...
Parent
Ruby's remaining problems (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, any scripting language is a big disadvantage when compared to perl because only perl has CPAN. The organized central archive for extensions with support distributed as a standard module was a brilliant move by Larry Wall; every other scripting language is still playing catchup, and still no one else can compare to even where CPAN was four years ago. (RAA is better than nothing, but it's still not there. CPAN's hierarchical naming scheme, while occasionally inconsistent, was a really good idea)
For commercial use, I'd also want some of ruby's remaining licensing issues cleaned up, but I understand that's been taken care of. (I haven't checked lately)
Parent
Re:Ruby's remaining problems (Score:3, Informative)
Performance: Well, don't forget it include programmer performance. My Ruby programs are written in 1/5 the time of my Perl programs and usually have acceptable performance.
Ruby is dual-licensed, and one of the licenses is the familiar GPL so commercial use is no problem.
Re:Short version... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really; if you are a savvy OO-script developer, you are using Ruby or Python or something like it already, you've made your choice. Both languages are trying to pull new developers from other languages, like C or Java. As such, I think they actually help each other -- the potential pool of new people is still very large.
Another scripting language (Score:3, Interesting)
I mention this because I understand Ruby's semantics are like Scheme (but the syntax is different, or we'd call it a Scheme).
The intro from the scsh paper [scsh.net] (Olin Shivers) convinced me to try it out:
"Shell programming terrifies me. There is something about writing a simple shell script that is just much, much more unpleasant than writing a simple C program, or a simple COMMON LISP program, or a simple Mips assembler program
He's not talking about a simple shell program (like "rm -fr
Crossplatform Ruby (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I have found if you are really interested in RAD w/ Ruby + QT is fine for linux.
But Wx is cross platform and free! and tools like VisualWx [altervista.org] which has support for WxRuby certainly help.
Unfortunately it is only on windows atm AFAIK
KDevelop (Score:5, Insightful)
Since I wanted to see what the fuss was about, I recently grabbed the most recent KDevelop and took it for a spin. It's got a ton of really, really cool stuff in there. Integration with valgrind is sweet. The debugger integration is a Good Thing. The reasonably intuitive API documentation access is great. The integration with QT designer is beautiful.
If I were just starting to code, I'd probably use Kdevelop.
However, I found over the course of a couple of painful days that I'm too dependent on some features of emacs to make the switch worthwhile. Quick searching. Tab indentation. Keyboard split buffers. Mouseless cut and paste.
Some of these have equivalents in Kdevelop that would just require relearning a different way to work, which is fine, if somewhat aggravating in my personal case. But some, like tab indentation, don't. So I'm back in good old emacs.
I hear that there may be an effort to embed emacs as one of the source code editor options, in which case I'd definitely switch. I'd probably even switch if there were some reasonable emacs-like bindings in Kate. It looks like a really cool tool generally, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to make a switch sometime in the not too distant future.
Re:KDevelop (Score:2)
Ditto, ditto, ditto, except in my case it's with vim.
I'd love to be able to use vim inside kdevelop. I'm actually a bit better off than you are, because there's a vim kpart, so it's theoretically possible to do: except whenev
Re:KDevelop (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:KDevelop (Score:2)
Rofl :))
Ruby seems on the right track. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ruby seems on the right track: the decision of not using thousands of XML configuration files but rather doing everything in code seems like heaven.
Re:Ruby seems on the right track. (Score:2, Interesting)
There must be some awful uses of XML config files out there, because a lot of developers complain about it.
I don't know much about it, but seems like they could have a use in some circumstances, and allowing users to edit those rather than strings in the code might be a Good Thing. This depends of course on them having a decent end-user XML editor, clear and succinct XML, and tools for processing XML for the progr
Re:Ruby seems on the right track. (Score:3, Informative)
J2EE. Application servers. Tools that generate mappings between databases and Java classes. Struts. etc etc etc.
Re:Ruby seems on the right track. (Score:3, Interesting)
JRuby and RDT (Score:5, Informative)
JRuby [sf.net] is a 100% java implementation of Ruby 1.8. The most recent release is pretty old, but the version in CVS is shaping up nicely and is getting quite stable. I joined development over a month ago, and work has been rapidly ramping up.
The Ruby Development Tool [sf.net] aims to bring a full Ruby develop/test/debug environment to the Eclipse platform. It is also rapidly maturing, and may in the future use portions of JRuby for parsing and debugging. While using or developing JRuby, the RDT is a welcome companion, allowing me to stay within Eclipse when developing both Java and Ruby.
I would also recommend tracing back to previous Ruby posts on
Why reimplement Ruby? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the trouble is that Ruby is a great language in search of a good implementation.
The current Ruby implementation has various weaknesses -- primitive text support is the most mentioned one (you can't step through a string char by char, I kid you not). Lack of native threading (it uses weird homemade application-level threads) some concurrency issues (it's C with lots of static variables -- I may be very out-of-date here though) and integration problems (it's very much designed with a 'C and UNIX and nothing else' mindset) are also problematic.
Thus, a port of Ruby to the Java or
Parent
Re:Why reimplement Ruby? (Score:4, Informative)
That's a good summary of some of Ruby's shortcomings.
You can step through a string character by character, though. It's just not obvious how, and that's a bit of a flaw. There should probably be an obvious method like "each_char".
If you don't mind getting your characters as numeric codes, you can use String.each_byte. It's easy to turn each byte back into a character using Integer.chr:
Or use String.scan:
Ruby being Ruby, there are probably another dozen ways to do it. And, for those who wish Ruby did have a String.each_char method, just add it:
And now...
(Please excuse the lack of indenting. /. and I can't seem to agree on how to make indenting work.)
Parent
Re:Why reimplement Ruby? (Score:4, Interesting)
(this goes for both comments above)
I'm referring to stepping through a string character by character -- I should have said that rather than 'char by char', which is open to misinterpretation. I meant 'text character' rather than a C 'char' type, which can indeed be done with 'each_byte'.
For instance, a lot of strings contain Asian characters that are intrinsically more than 1 byte long, or combining characters which consist of a 'main' character and 1 (for most european languages) or more (for the nightmare that is Vietnamese) accent marks. To ruby, it's all just bytes -- if 64 A7 03 A7 04 means an 'a' with an acute accent and a dot, ruby will cheerfully give you those 5 seperate bytes and let you implement the concept of a character yourself.
There are various libraries for Ruby that extend the string class to handle text in different languages and encodings, but this is still nothing like as good as just being able to get, set, read, write, and match characters, as I can in most other high-level environments. Unfortunately, while the concept of a text encoding is built into ruby, it is hardcoded with knowledge of a few particular encodings and it only uses them for IO -- in internal processing, it's welcome to the wonderful world of each_byte.
All this would go away (along with many other issues) if there were an implementation of Ruby for some modern runtime environment such as Java.
This situation and the discussions behind it is one of the things that inspired me to write this essay (which may or may not be interesting, I just mention it):
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
Parent
Re:Why reimplement Ruby? (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like a case for my Unicode FAQ!
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unicode.shtml
Character set != encoding. Longest representation of a character in a standard Unicode encoding is necessarily > 32 bits.
In any case, Java, C# and (with eg Boost) C++ don't have this problem and Perl and Python, while not perfect, are much better than Ruby. If you have a mass of generic text to process, like maybe a big data
Get out your wallet (Score:3, Insightful)
All well and good, but if your professional application is proprietary (non-open), you'll need a paid-up Qt licence to go with it.
Re:Get out your wallet (Score:2)
There also a good IDE called Widestudio [widestudio.org]. It's a large download (over 100MB) because it comes with installs for Python, Perl and Ruby. But it's a good tool for creating effective GUI applications.
wx..Ruby? (Score:2)
Seems to me it would be really interesting if there was a wxRuby and a way to package the wxRuby app. Perhaps when parrot is finished this will be a ring to bind them?
Someone please tell me what I gain over Python? (Score:4, Interesting)
And since Python makes win32 programming easy for those who don't use Visual Studio, I have learned to be a Windows programmer over the last couple of weeks.
What do I gain over Python by switching to Ruby? I see a lot of explainations, but as far as I can tell, in addition to the awesomeness of Python's language and libraries, these are the things that I need that I can't seem to find in Ruby(but might not be looking in the right place):
1) Java byte-code compiling (jython)
2) full win32 APIs
3) full win32 COM access
4) Complete Object Database implementation (ZODB)
5) List-comprehension
Someone please educate me on the advantages of Ruby over Python. Cause right now, it is hard to imagine a better language than the snake!
Re:Someone please tell me what I gain over Python? (Score:3, Interesting)
JVM implementation: http://jruby.sourceforge.net/
Win32 support:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/win32.h t ml
Object DB: http://www.garret.ru/~knizhnik/dybase.html (I don't know anything about this one, just found it on Google)
List comprehension: Ruby blocks are a more general (and IMO more elegant) me
There is only one guide to Ruby... (Score:5, Informative)
Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby [poignantguide.net]
Those foxes! That cat! The crazy goat!