What is Ruby on Rails? 296
Robby Russell writes "ONLamp.com has published another article by Curt Hibbs titled, 'What is Ruby on Rails?.' In this article, Curt goes on to discuss all the major components of the popular Rails web framework and shows it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This article highlights all the major features, from Active Record to Web Services, which are going to be included in the upcoming 1.0 RC release of Ruby on Rails. With one book published already and four more on the way, do you think Rails will continue gaining as much popularity in the coming year?" An interesting follow-up to the two part tutorial from earlier this year.
Watch the demo... (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of, why don't you check out my Ruby on Rails/Typo based blog, fak3r.com [fak3r.com]
Seaside ? (Score:3, Informative)
\begin{rant} ;-)
Ok, I know, it's probably because it's written in that extremely complex and arcane language, Smalltalk... not. Smalltalk is extremely simple to use -- literally a child's play
\end{rant}
Anyway, Seaside is an incredible framework to develop Web Applications -- not just CRUD apps. It has a wonderful component system, inspired by WebObjects (another wonderful framework !), and leverage Smalltalk: you have compilation on the fly, you can modify something at runtime (and I mean, even without quitting the current web session !), use the incredible debugging/refactoring possibilities, and reuse of the zillions of libraries and code available for Squeak [squeak.org].
More over, it has continuations. And that's really useful (as Paul Graham demonstrated..) for building neat webapps. Basically with Seaside you program applications nearly the same way you'd program a "normal" application. The whole HTTP process is completely abstracted (check the videos [seaside.st]).
Frankly, it's really a joy to develop with Seaside, and you should have a look :-)
forget Rails (Score:3, Informative)
Seaside Smalltalk (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Question about RoR (Score:2, Informative)
If you're using RoR, your code we'll be generated with a Controller, a Model and a View. Business rules code belongs to the Controller.
Google for MVC, you seem to miss the point completly (or was it a joke?).
WebServices not new to Rails (Score:2, Informative)
Learn Ruby Book (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is Rails useful to aggregate web services? (Score:2, Informative)
As the article says, there are really two components to the framework, ActiveRecord and ActionPack, which handle the model, then the controller/view sections respectively. Each of these can be used without the other, in fact I'm considering using ActiveRecord for a non-web project in the near future.
Re:YASLFFFSC (Score:2, Informative)
Big Nerd Ranch has Ruby on Rails Bootcamp (Score:4, Informative)
Ruby on Rails on Fedora Core 4 (Score:2, Informative)
More than just Scaffold (Score:3, Informative)
After the first few tutorials I read my impression was almost "that's it?" There demo/article Four Days With Rails [homelinux.org] gives a better view of going beyond the scaffolding, as does the Pragmatic Programmers' rails book.
My experience (Score:5, Informative)
It forces you to create a web application that is done-right(tm). The way it forces you is very insidious. If you create your application and database in a certain way then everything is very simple and easy to do. If you stray outside that way though, then suddenly you have to do so much more work. In this way you are led down the path of least resistance to a good design, and it actually works! Please try it for a week or two before you dismiss this, I was skeptical too
In Java to get the same functionality that I would get for free in rails I might have to use: Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts. The amount of configuration that all of those things take is very daunting, and can often have issues. Rails will give you all that functionality (well most of it) for free.
There *are* problems with with rails. The biggest in my mind is documentation. The wiki sucks. You really have to buy the Agile Web Development With Rails book to learn, but hopefully that will improve. This lack of documentation makes it hard when you want to stray outside of the framework. Rails really needs the equivalent of the PHP documentation with annotated comments.
Anyways, Rails is here to stay. I'm sure of that now having tried it myself. It feels painful to have to go back and develop in other languages for web development now!
Re:XML? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've been using it... (Score:2, Informative)
New Security Framework for Ruby on Rails (Score:5, Informative)
ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.
If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.
The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.
Re:YASLFFFSC (Score:1, Informative)
You cannot intuit your way to understanding (Score:4, Informative)
Ruby - OOP language which is really quite elegant, tidy, and intuitive and has a bunch of standard APIs
Ruby on Rails - Additional structure and helpers for building a web application, written in Ruby
The only way you'll find out if you like it is to try doing something with it - if you seriously want to make a web application or something, you could get an idea of how to use it by watching the tutorial video.
http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take
Re:How does it deal with changes? (Score:3, Informative)
Rails and legacy databases (Score:5, Informative)
PostgreSQL + Ruby + Rails = the next (lamp)
PRR, RPR, RRP... we need a cool acronym
Instant Rails (Score:5, Informative)
Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.
http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/ [rubyforge.org]
Re:More than just Scaffold (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, I know of at least three secirity implementations being actively worked on and used (in order from least to greatest complexity):
1) There is a generator on the rails wiki:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/LoginGene
2) Bruce Perens has just released ModelSecurity:
http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ModelSecurity/ [perens.com]
3) ActiveRBAC
https://rbaconrails.turingstudio.com/trac/wiki [turingstudio.com]
There has also been considerable work done on a component model that will make these even easier to use and extend.
Re:What I want - client side ruby (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ruby on Rails only works on MySQL (Score:2, Informative)
If it didn't, I wouldn't be so in love with it
Re:Don't knock it before you try it... (Score:2, Informative)
37signals made RoR.
Re:Watch the demo... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:YASLFFFSC (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XML? (Score:2, Informative)
And yes, speaking as one of the developers - it could use some polish.
Re:I bet it does it all by convention...NOT! (Score:2, Informative)
Programming Rails [programmingrails.com]
Auth Generator (Score:1, Informative)
I see talks about login generator and other way to handle users. Just to let you know there is an authentification generator I released few days ago at http://penso.info/rails/auth_generator/ [penso.info]
It offers a nice interface to handle users, you can edit/remove/add users, put them into groups and allow specific pages only to specific groups (like ADMIN group, etc). All the usual pages like forgot password/resend the confirmation/change password, etc, that you want your users to have are available out of the box.
There is a quick video also that takes you from nothing to a website handling articles, with user authentification in mind.