Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released

Simon (S2) writes "Ruby on Rails 1.0 has been released. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.0 is mostly about making all the work we've been doing solid. So it's not packed with new features over 0.14.x, but has spit, polish, and long nights applied to iron out kinks and ensure that it works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people.' " The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.

Commercial equivalent is...?

When talking about commercial software like MS Office, we talk about the "Open source equivalent" OpenOffice.org and stuff like that. I'm curious to know whether there is a commercial equivalent to Ruby on Rails.

Re:Commercial equivalent is...?

Perhaps Coldfusion, WebObjects, .net, or J2EE+Struts (depending on your definition of 'commercial')

Re:Commercial equivalent is...?

Ruby on Rails is to mod_ruby what Fusebox is to Coldfusion.

Coldfusion is a language of itself [albeit a simple one] that runs on top of a J2EE engine called Jrun... /me = coldfusion person (I also know and use ruby a lot, and am working on learning RoR)

Re:Mod_python has easier syntax

It's hard to get excited about any tool based on Ruby because it inherits so much confusing syntax from Perl.

Where did you get this impression? Maybe because you saw some regular expressions in Ruby? Ruby syntax is much, much clearer than Perl.

Take a look here [rubyist.net]

Re:Commercial equivalent is...?

ROR has been compared to hibernate+struts, in fact I believe much of the motivation behind ROR was to create a more full featured hibernate solution.

ROR isn't as mature as j2ee struts+hibernate but it will be soon. ROR has tons of potential.

It just works... mostly

Screw that overstated "It just works" stuff. I like the truthfulness of their statement, "it works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people"

Er

Excuse me for sounding dumb, but what is Ruby on Rails? I've heard a lot about it recently, but haven't the slightest clue what it is. A little bit of background would be most appreciated.

Re:Er

Excuse me for sounding dumb, but what is Ruby on Rails? I've heard a lot about it recently, but haven't the slightest clue what it is. A little bit of background would be most appreciated.

Here's [rubyonrails.org] some fliks to explain.

Watch this video

This [rubyonrails.org] is a 15 min presentation someone did setting up a weblog using it. I think this example better explains it than most descriptions I've read.

Re:Watch this video

Since the web site is slashdotted (and the video too) could you explain what it is and why someone would want to use it?

That is one sexy video.

Basically, Ruby on Rails saves you lots of hassle.

About 5 years ago, if you wanted to make a blog, you'd sit down and design a database schema. You'd design a controller that would have certain actions. You'd write a bunch of templates that would have variable locations. You'd extend the controller to use these templates from the db to make views. You'd write pages which allowed editing of these values. You'd write code for sanity checking. You'd write unit tests. You'd do everything over again that you'd done before.

Slashcode, Scoop, you name it -- they were all written through the same ideas.

Ruby on Rails makes all the redundant parts go away. In the video (which I just watched, and finally gives me a compelling reason to learn and use Ruby), the person sits down and generates a basic controller for their blog. They then show that the basic templates generated will show text. It takes another 5 minutes to define a db called posts and generate a default action for it. The code is smart enough to just directly make the things like title and body editable widgets on the page. 5 minutes to have posted blogs!

Then the video takes 5 minutes to extend this by writing about 15 lines of code. This has a big effect: the listing of posts is abstracted out into a block that can be included in any page. The ordering is reversed. The title attribute is made a required field.

But what good is a blog without comments? In the final 5 minutes, the author quickly adds a comment table, generates a comment controller, says that posts own comments, sticks in 3 lines of code in the post view segment which do a foreach associated comment, display, and then adds a page to edit comments. They also (at the same time) show us the basics of the unit-testing framework you get "for free" (the basic test is return true, but he changed it to test if the comment post code worked with another 4 lines of code).

The entire thing took 15 minutes to write and had 58 lines of code. When the db schema changed, the code adapted -- the programmer did not have to rewrite the code. When the programmer wanted to change anything, the code would quickly bend itself to the task.

I dare say it's the sexiest thing I've seen yet. If they ever release a version 2 that allows for simple Javascript on the client for AJAX interfaces, there will be only 1 game in town for web development!

I'm not inexperienced in web design. I have written my own stuff to test ideas out, as well as participated in Scoop's development to a degree. Recently I've been playing with Drupal because all the basics are setup with it, and you can just extend it with modules. I can honestly say that while it took me an hour to setup Drupal (and another hour to get it completely to how I liked it) it a test config, I could probably replicate the base distribution plus the modules I use in Ruby on Rails within a day -- maybe 2, if I'm slow. It's that effective!

convention over configuration

You're trying to be funny, but you've got the only comment so far that mentions what I consider to be the most significant thing about Rails - convention over configuration. One reason why Rails development is so fast and often enjoyable is that you don't have to muck about with a lot of XML config files. If you just follow the path of least resistance, things just work out right.

The MVC triad in Rails uses the ActiveRecord class for the model part. ActiveRecord is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) class that follows a few clever rules about doing the mapping, so most of the time you don't have to repeat your mapping multiple times. If you have a "User" class, it knows to look for a table in the db called "users", and assumes the primary key is an integer named "id". A foreign key to an account record is assumed to be called "account_id". The creation time of a record is assumed to be a datetime named "created_at". All common elements have reasonable defaults, so when you are working on your app, you don't need to spend a lot of time mucking about with config files to specify stuff that is just so fracking obvious that it is a waste of your time to type it.

Rails is not all things to all programmers, but it has certainly hit the sweet spot for a huge class of web applications - database backed interactive sites. The Rails design is good for probably 90% of the sites that I use most.

As for coder jollies, well, it's been a while since I enjoyed programming. With Rails I've regained my enjoyment for programming enough that I'm considering doing that for the main part of my work again.

When?

Agree that Ruby on Rails has got some traction. But when would it get enough traction to be used as a standard framework for web apps at enterprise level?

I am working in tech division of a financial firm, and I put question to our big app dev group if anybody had worked on RoR for a project - and most people had no idea what I was talking about.

Please note that right now almost everybody in the firm uses java/j2ee - for everything - even for batch processing which can be easily done with simple perl scripts!

Re:When?

If you have to use Java, a copy-cat framework for Java is Trails [java.net]. The linked articles make it look pretty impressive.

Another relatively unknown java framework I've flirted with very recently is Stripes [mc4j.org]. It's claim to fame is that its configuration is annotation based. Dev consists of the view and action, no worrying about an xml file to sync between the two.

One word

Prototype.

Next time there is a project to X, do a prototype of some of the functions in RoR, ostensibly so you can get it done in a couple of days and you can use it to figure out requirements. After playing with a couple of days, sit back and watch as the app dev group spends a month laying the keel for their "enterprise" class implementation. Continue to use your prototype to demonstrate new requirements (they always come up). If, after three or four months, the app dev group doesn't appear close to being able to deliever any business value, then one question that management should raise is what, exactly, is the property of "enterprise" that justifies the difference in effort between rails and whatever they're using. Then determine if it could indeed be put in the RoR prototype. If so, you're in. If not, you've contributed to requirements understanding and live to fight another day.

compatibility

I'd figuratively pee on my copy of Macromedia Flash if I knew a Blender 3D plugin had proliferated widely -- meaning if IE bundled it. Is this language/framework's new thinking done on the server side and to the clients it'd be business as usual, great, I'll put down my php book. What's the deal in this regard?

A better solution than PHP.

Ruby on Rails provides a far superior solution for web sites than PHP in many cases. It would be excellent if it ended up usurping PHP for most PHP-based sites.

PHP's bad reputation with regards to its security is, unfortunately, harming the open source community. Managers who are considering switching to open source solutions are hearing about the security flaws in PHP, and mistakenly thinking that Apache, MySQL and Linux are insecure (due to the popular 'LAMP' association). Of course, that isn't the case by a long shot.

Regardless of what people switch to, the main focus needs to be on moving away from PHP. Ruby on Rails provides a rapidly maturing alternative for building all sorts of web sites.

You speak of momentum.

Only an individual new to the computing industry would put much faith in "momentum".

I've been around it for decades. I remember when Honeywell and Data General had "momentum". I'd be surprised if you've ever even seen a picture of their hardware.

A bit later there was CP/M. And Apple. Apple had much "momentum" in the 1980s, only to almost hit rock bottom. At least they've been able to pick themselves up again.

There was even talk this morning about Java losing its "momentum".

Ruby on Rails could very well overtake PHP quite quickly.

While some onus does rest on developers to develop quality code, that does not mean that the language and any implementations should not take steps to limit the ability of the programmer to write faulty code.

That holds especially true for languages that are used in hostile environments, such as the WWW. Considering that Web development is touted as PHP's strong point, one would think it would have excellent security. Of course, we know from experience that that is not the case.

Ruby won't necessarily make your code perfect. But Ruby, along with sound development techniques (unit testing, for example), will result in very secure applications. The use of PHP, on the other hand, is basically an invitation for security issues. It is not a well designed language, and it is not well implemented.

Commercial/Enterprise use?

I've heard plenty about RoR on Slashdot - but to be honest, thats about where it stops. Does anyone have any experience or views deploying a medium/high volume commercial or enterprise solution using this?

I have yet to personally see RoR in either situation and I don't know anyone who has - I'm not knocking RoR, just curious how it's actually being used.

Re:Commercial/Enterprise use?

There is a list of users at:

http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications [rubyonrails.org]

Rails Day

Will there be another railsday, like the one they had last June?

New Look?

The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.

Would that be the "Service Unable: Damn You Slashdot" look?

Perl people, check out Catalyst

This is an MVC framework for Perl that resembles RoR in a lot of ways.

http://catalyst.perl.org/ [perl.org]

It's very nice so far, especially the controller portion. There's lots of addons and plugins for it, all of which are entirely optional. It's actually very open-ended and easy to extend.

I use the controller classes extensively, but write my own model, view, and support classes. Catalyst culture seems to encourage Class::DBI parentage as a base model class, but it's simple to roll your own (I hate CDBI, so I based mine on Ima::DBI instead). Your classes can work independently of Catalyst... it imposes no restrictions or inheritance constraints on you. Worth checking out.

Give ruby a quick try first

I heartily suggest that the curious among you check out http://tryruby.hobix.com/ [hobix.com]. It's a great, quick interactive introduction to ruby. You can kick around the tires (so to speak) without needing to do anything more than visit the webpage. It's a great language with or without rails.

Also a great example of Ajaxy goodness, not to buzzword it too much. It's written by the affluent and creative why. Check out his neat-o blog too: http://redhanded.hobix.com/ [hobix.com]

-mix

Why rails annoys me...

I love Ruby. Once I discovered Ruby, it's become my prefered general purpose language. I love the fact it's a pure object oriented language. I love it's consisiveness. I love it's lack of "funny" characters (for the most part).

I freakin' can't stand using Rails. I remember getting very excited about it when I first discovered it. Watching apps being developed in 15 minutes. I read all the tutorials. I even bought the book from pragmatic programmer. I studied and wrote programs for 3 weeks. And I just could never get into it. On so many occasions I just felt cheated. It was all valid ruby code, but it just didn't seem in the spirit of ruby. My namespace was cluttered with a million methods. The names of which didn't seem logical and_reminded_me_of_php_function_names_rather_than_ an_object_oriented_language (anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores). During those 3 weeks I just couldn't enjoy programming and couldn't get into it. I tried 2 more times over the next 2 months to try it again, but the same thing.

The biggest annoyance was automated code generation. It was almost pointless for me. If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database. Well, this is what I have to do in most other web languages anyway! So what's the advantage? Scaffolding was great at this because it did everything dynamically. However, you can't reasonably keep the scaffolding because it's not meant to be your program. It's meant to be support around your program.

The experience seemed more like programming in php with a twist of mod_perl. All the reasons I wanted to get away from perl and php for web programming were back when I tried to write a large application. Rails just doesn't seem in the spirit of Ruby. It's not bad. Don't get me wrong. But it's not this revolutionary framework so many people would have you believe. Sure, it's great to show the 15 minute video. But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails.

Re:Why rails annoys me...

Rails seems to be to web development what Dreamweaver is to HTML authoring. Nice and visual at first then you discover how it starts to get in your way. Give me Perl and Emacs any day.

Re:Why rails annoys me...

I think this is a problem with ALL frameworks which try and do a lot of automatic code generation - if you want any modifications done, it becomes really difficult. All high-level frameworks are written optimized for a certain type of solution and if what you are trying to do does not fit into that style perfectly, you are going to have some real problems. This is true for RoR, Django, Turbogears, and most software.

This is one of the reasons J2EE still exists - individual components of it do a lot, but you will need to spend the time to put all of those together and make them work together. But J2EE has a few design faults and looks like it was designed by a committee more concerned about "Descriptive" programming than about getting software developed. This makes J2EE a pain-in-the-ass to work with.

A simplified version of J2EE - with a minimal number of crappy XML descriptor files will be a good base framework.

A fairly good framework which I use is Webware for python - it does not generate a lot of code and stuff, but it provides the essential mechanisms which you can use for getting the work done. It will take longer to code in than RoR but it is far more flexible and is kinda similar to J2EE but without the crap. http://www.webwareforpython.org/ [webwareforpython.org].

The only problem with using Python, Ruby etc is that as they are not strongly typed, you will not find out some problems at compile time and these problems will only show up at runtime, unlike in Java.

Re:Why rails annoys me...

I love it's lack of "funny" characters (for the most part).

if you're referring to a lack of odd people in the ruby community you'll be horrified to know there's many.

thanks for your post, all valid opinion .. i just suspect you're one of these highly intelligent programmers that trip over some minor features you find annoying and then blow your frustrations out of perspective.

(anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores)

granted some of the method names are overly verbose! i've thought that often when looking through the APIs and docs. but that criticism needs to be tempered by pointing out the verbose methods are used very infrequently. 99% of the methods i use are small and concise, like: truncate(), h(), link_to(), redirect() etc.

The biggest annoyance was automated code generation

see this i'm finding hard to understand. when i want to start a new model and controller, i type a line in a prompt, and it makes the few files i need to begin. 'begin' being the operative word. there endeth the code generation.

my method of automated code generation is copy and paste.

If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database

i've NEVER experienced this. never never never. and i have no idea what you're talking about. one of the real clinchers of rails for me is its use of ActionRecord to interface with the database. i modify my database constantly without breaking any code. the only case i can think of when what you describe could happen is if i were to rename a column in the database, then my row.name object wouldn't match. but i would consider a broken website due to this the fault of a stupid developer.

to be able to connect to my database, retrieve a record and update it, in 1 line in some cases, becomes rather neccessary for a developer once they've tried it.

Mydb.update(id, :name => 'John')

will do all of these. i take a wee dance on the grave of large-scale php development everytime i use that.

But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails

and here is where i'm convinced that you are what i think you are (an intelligent programmer who's taken big issue over minor irritations). large scale use of rails is very easy to find [rubyonrails.org] if you visit the rails site . It's also very easy to find a larger list [rubyonrails.com], and a list of interesting apps [rubyonrails.com] to boot. granted, not moving pictures, but .. oh go away.

For some uses....

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RealWorldU sage [rubyonrails.org] I regularly partake in some Penny Arcade at penny-arcade.com . If you don't know about it, check it out.

Web 2.0, Baby!

The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.

I'm guessing more pastels. And rounded corners.

My Fucking God

No wonder some people refuse to use Rails... It's bloody fucking hard to install. I've been trying to install the damn thing for over 2 hours now. suPHP is a fucking walk in the park compared to this.

Easy installation

For a window platform, download Instant Rails [rubyforge.org]

Or for linux, install mod_scgi [mems-exchange.org] and follow the instructions here [rubyonrails.com]

It's stinkin' easy, I can do it in about 5 minutes. Any hosting admin worth their salt can even script it in about 10 minutes.

Umm, that was fun... I guess.

sudo apt-get install rails
cd /var/www
mkdir rails
rails rails
cd rails
ruby script/server
 
=> Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000/
=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options
[2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
[2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO ruby 1.8.3 (2005-06-23) [i486-linux]
[2005-12-13 21:22:19] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=27106 port=3000
 
[... ctrl-c ....]
 
[2005-12-13 21:22:35] INFO going to shutdown ...
[2005-12-13 21:22:35] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start done.

First question: Do I get a cookie?

Next question: Now what do I do?

Stupid name

I always feel like donating something to the Red Cross whenever I hear about Ruby on Rails.. think of the children.

Ruby 2.0 Release Date?

Does anyone know when Ruby 2.0 will be released.

Being able to gain the performance from having a bytecode/virtual machine setup would be wonderful.

So...

When is Ruby on Rails getting its own slashdot icon? Every other frickin' web development story is either "Rails is great" or "Watch the J2EE-Rails-Python flamewar"

AJAX quality is suspect

It's great that Ruby is 1.0.

But it's unfortunate that the preferred Ruby AJAX design pattern still includes prototype.js, because that library as written is fundamentally dangerous. It's written in a fashion which demonstrates that the author is very adept with JavaScript and functional programming in general; but it also does some unpardonably cute tricks in extending core objects, thereby changing the overall JavaScript environment and making the core AJAX library not play nicely with others. (And if ever there was an environment where you need to have good manners and not piss in the pool, it's the browser + JavaScript environment.)

The sad thing is that there's nothing about the functionality of prototype.js which requires all that object and syntax wizardry to function correctly. It could easily be re-written to be perfectly safe. But at this point, the bell has been rung; other libs such as Rico now rely on those same insidious tricks, and 1.0 is out the door.

Sigh. So close, so close.

if i'm new to web development...

i take it i should stick to a very solid LAMP base then look into ruby on the rails once i have some real code under my belt? make sure i don't learn some trendy language that dies in a couple years? and i assume this isn't a good language for someone with very little (essentially no) experience to jump into and try to learn?


also, how is this implimented? does it preform operations serverside that output the html/xml/whatever code in a similar fashion as php? does it include database software in the ruby framework or do you still need something that is/is like Mysql to handle databases?

Documentation

Does anyone know of a source for good downloadable Ruby documentation? I did look over the documentation section on the ruby website briefly, but what was offered there was far too web based for my tastes, and I'd personally prefer something closer to a downloadable .chm file like the PHP documentation. Can someone please provide a link to the closest equivalent?

Can anyone offer a contrast to Gears and Django?

I know the other frameworks are in Python, but I don't have a problem with tabs. Can anyone make a comparison about why Ruby on Rails is better or worse than these other two rapid web prototyping frameworks? I haven't coded in Python in 4+ years, has Ruby become significantly better or different than Python for web, text, and database processing?

http://turbogears.org/download/ [turbogears.org]
http://www.djangoproject.com/ [djangoproject.com]

Thanks to anyone who has used all 3 frameworks or has any insight.

Jim

Re:Can anyone offer a contrast to Gears and Django

I've briefly looked at all three frameworks, and here are my impressions:

Turbogears is made up of separately developed components; CherryPy for the controller and HTTP server, SQLObject for database modelling and Kid for templating. Turbogears is pretty similar to RoR, but has less automation, and has a more Pythonic and component-based approach to development. Sometimes it's a little obvious that the components were created separately

Django is more like Rails, but is somewhat more specialised. If you want to create a site with an administration section, then Django does a lot of the work for you. Beyond that, Django stacks up pretty equally against RoR.

Both these frameworks are Python based, which again results in some differences. They may be easier to learn, but may lack a little of the flexibility that Ruby boasts. Ruby doesn't have many features that Python hasn't, but it does have some.

Symfony

Anyone who is looking for a PHP port of Ruby on Rails has to take a look at Symfony [symfony-project.com].

Based on the best practices of web development, thoroughly tried on several active websites, symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

If you have been looking for a Rails/Django-like framework for PHP projects with features such as:

* simple templating and helpers
* cache management
* multiple environments support
* deployment management
* scaffolding
* smart URLs
* multilingual and I18N support
* object model and MVC separation
* Ajax support

Ruby on Rails on Fedora Core 4

Just thought I'd add that I've found this guide very useful for Rails on FC4: http://digitalmediaminute.com/howto/fc4rails/ [digitalmediaminute.com]. Very thorough.

Rails cost/benefit results

So far, I love Rails, because I have done the following, with these initial costs:

1. new domain name, $5/year
2. Rails host acct, $12/year
3. my time spent, about 6 to 10 hours a week for last 2 months

Installed Rails Apps (open source): (sorry, no links to my domain, must avoid /. effect):

• blog at my own domain using typo [leetsoft.com]
• agile, extreme programming management tool using eXPlainPMT [explainpmt.com]
• a to do list using Tracks [rousette.org.uk]
• content management system using MuraveyWeb [muravey.net] CMS

How is this different? I only worry about one Terms of Service, imposed by the web host. I control all aspects of the deployment of the Rails apps. So the blog is not just my blog, its a blog at my domain (or sub-domain if I perfer), and I control the databases that store its content. In fact, I control every aspect of the blog. For instance, I could make the blog appear and disappear based upon phases of the moon. Can you do that with any blog host, just by changing two links at a shell prompt?

The same goes for every other Rails app I have deployed on my server account. The Rails principles of "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) and convention over configuration, meant that once I installed one Rails app, the experience was immediately applicable to installing the rest. They all have the same directory structure, and the same configuration file for database connection, which is the only configuration file you must edit.

The rest just works, usually. You have to check your versions, and make sure your app and Rails work at the current version. I admit I have experience building server side web projects using VB6 DLL and ASP.NET, along with equally strong UNIX background, so I was able to tweak a few things and proceed when they didn't work the first time. Don't dispair, I was able to make it work after a few hours of checking on-line forums, and trying some suggestions.

Component Model

Does Rails have any kind of a component model yet? Last I checked they abstracted me completly away from the database with ActiveRecord, but I was still left to manually parse fields out of the request. That just doesn't do it for me when there are tools like .NET and Tapestry/Wicket out there.

Rails learning curve DOCUMENTED

I've read all the hype and I'm convinced that I want to learn Rails.

I'm documenting my experiences here:
http://www.railsroad.com/typo/ [railsroad.com] is going to detail my experiences learning Rails and Ruby.

There has been lots of hype about the incredible productivity boosts that Rails gives developers. Railsroad.com is going to detail my experiences learning Rails and Ruby.

Unlike some of the Rails blogs written by self-professed Ruby newbies. I'm a real newbie! I'm not coming from a background of 5 years developing web applications in Java.

I programmed games in Basic in the early 1980's, BUT I stopped programming when I started dating, so I'm a real newbie.

I've learned a lot about what users want having created several popular sites. My hope is that Rails is the tool to help me draw my ideas into the real world.

I promise I'm going to share exactly what I think about Rails and Ruby. No Hype, no B.S.!

Plus, I think It'll be fun for experienced programmers to laught at my ignorance.

Now, I've got to get back to work.

Rails brings the "Rapid" to Rapid App Development

I have been writing some internal web applications for my corporation using Ruby on Rails. I will never go back to PHP or ASP.NET. Ruby on Rails lets me write things in 10 hours it would take me 50 hours to write in PHP. The framework is set up to make it easy for you to re-use code and stylesheets so you don't end up writing the same stuff over and over. I've written much more PHP code than Ruby code but I am already much more productive in RoR.

I love how small and compact RoR apps are. You end up with less lines of code and therefore project maintenance is so much easier. The "migrate" class is amazing. Gives you version control for your database schema. It really speeds up the development cycle.

Not only that but Ruby on Rails is fun to program in! Everything is so squeaky clean and organized. It gives you a good feeling and is much more readable than the old spaghetti code I used to write in PHP. Ruby on Rails has templating built in so you don't have to go install and learn some third party template program. I love it. I am so much more productive I am blowing away the other web developers who write in non-RoR frameworks. They have no chance at competing with me.

Mambo/Joomla clone

I have not tried ruby yet, but are there any CMS similar to Mambo/Joomla for ruby?

Thanks.

editor

I like that editor he is using in the presentation about schemas. Can someone tell me the name of it and if there is something almost identical to that for use on windows?

Re:"mostly right"???

I'd prefer to look at it as honesty.

Re:"mostly right"???

How would you describe the software you write?

Re:"mostly right"???

"mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people."??? Is this the standard by which the Ruby community judges software goodness? I'm speechless.

Yeah, it's not great, but at least it's honest. Go on any developer site - MSDN, java.sun.com, whatever, and you'll see a nice long list of submitted bugs. Fact is, no software is perfect, so don't go crazy when they admit there might be uncaught bugs.

Re:"mostly right"???

At least it's more honest than the usual "it brings world peace and helps improve your stamina" attitude I see with other frameworks, especially within the Java community (that last clause will probably start off a flamewar :->).

Re:"mostly right"???

That's a far higher standard than you'll find used by most commercial developers.

Remember, Ruby is at the forefront of the agile development community. Many developments in unit testing, for instance, directly involve Ruby. Ruby developers are often the most experienced at effectively employing such development techniques.

And you know what? It shows. Ruby software is often of extremely high quality. It's not perfect, but there is much effort taken to ensure correctly-functioning code.

Jebus, has the poster or mod ever used rails??????

The point of rails is to have sensible defaults that work most of the time. Web apps share A LOT of commonality. The idea is to take out repitiveness as much as possible. This is done with sensible defaults. If these aren't good for you, they can be changed. But it's meant to have reasonable defaults for most, unlike certain web languages that make you start from scratch every time.

Re:"mostly right"???

"mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people."???
Is this the standard by which the Ruby community judges software goodness? I'm speechless.

It certainly is better to know the problems/that there are problems in a piece of software, rather than having problems that are kept secret - the way MS, etc do it. Software is never perfect, whether you admit the problems it has or not.

Re:Ruby on Rails more "secure" than PHP?

Not directly.

However, many of the problems associated with PHP are just due to flaws in the design of PHP. It's more a case of PHP being worse than it should be, rather than Ruby on Rails being extremely secure.

That said, most Ruby on Rails-related code is written by far more experienced developers. As would be expected, the quality of the code is higher, and the likelyhood of security issues is vastly reduced. The trend in the Ruby community to heavily use unit testing also helps ensure that quality is a paramount consideration.

Re:Who cares?

Got any specifics there, pardner?

Re:isnt ruby too perlish?

It's funny, I thought this too when I first started playing with ruby. But once I actually started using the language I found that I wrote in it completely differently than perl. Closer to what little python I had written actually.

Ruby looks like perl because it uses the $ and @ prefixes, but it uses them for completely different purpose: in perl they denote type where in ruby they denote scope. This turns out to be a nice feature, since you should be using some sort of notation in your variable names to denote scope anyway. It also permits the concept of duck typing throughout the ruby community, which is a key feature in making the language natural and easy to use.

Furthermore, people tend to write ruby with a lot more OO than in perl. Again, much closer to python.

Finally, good ruby code uses blocks everywhere. You can do code block-like things in perl or python, but in ruby it's very simple, fairly clean, and a very natural part of the language. I think this is what really distinguishes ruby from python fundamentally as a language. RoR, like any app written in a ruby style, makes extensive use of this feature and it allows some of the things that make people so excited about rails.

Oh, and the culture of the ruby community is such that people tend to write code that's fairly consistent between authors. Python is similar, although this seems to be more a function of the language itself than the community's culture. Perl's culture, on the other hand, encourages creativity and variety between authors, making it hard to read other people's code unless you know most of the camel book. I've never had any trouble reading someone else's ruby code, and I know about as much ruby as I know perl.