What is Ruby on Rails?

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.

Re:YASLFFFSC

[MemoryDragon]

Actually no, Rails has heavily inspired many developments in many languages over the last year. Pretty much every framework currently at least is looking at the stuff the rails guys are doing and whether some of the concepts are viable. Stuff like Seam which also is excellent is heavily inspired by the ease of use metaphor of Rails, and the Prototype javascript libary used by rails currently sort of becomes a defacto standard for more advanced javascript stuff with many projects building on top of it. Rails definitely does not scale into the average J2EE project dimensions, but it has its merits and definitely made huge inroads in the web development domain over the last year.

Re:we already know

[MemoryDragon]

Actually many web developers keep a constant eye on rails, I am heavy into J2EE and like it, especially the stuff which is coming along Seam, Spring, JSF and EJB3, but almost every one I know who works in the domain, keeps an eye on rails as a fallback option for quick small webapps. Besides that many concepts and libaries currently are heavily evaluated for inclusion into other frameworks.

Is Rails useful to aggregate web services?

[shic]

I am intrigued by Rails and have the book waiting for me to read at home. I am curious, however, is Rails only really useful to implement something which uses the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture - where the model is defined in the context of a SQL RDBMS... or would Rails also be useful, for example, to aggregate a number of, say, local web-services to implement a single combined web service or site?

Re:YASLFFFSC

[endgame]

> Rails definitely does not scale into the average J2EE project dimensions

From my experience the "average" J2EE does not have to scale very far at all. J2EE architectures are capable of scaling very well, but a great deal of the time the extra comlexity is unwarranted for the task at hand. Rails is a great for a the large percentage of applications that fall into this category.

Don't knock it before you try it...

[SwedeGeek]

To anyone who has yet to try Ruby on Rails but refuses to do so because they think it is for speghetti coders, script kiddies, etc., I just have this one comment to make...

Who do you think the people evangelising RoR are? Do you think they are actually people who have only learned Ruby, so they don't know any better in trying to get other to try it? For some reason, I doubt it... While I don't necessarily have any hard evidence on user profiles, I would suggest such promoters have likely tried more than one programming language and web framework, and are using their own experience to come to the conclusion that RoR is worth at least trying out. Ruby has now been publicly available for 10 years [wikipedia.org], but there certainly wasn't much widespread excitement about Ruby in general until RoR came along. There has to be some valid reason for that. If it was really just a mob of script kiddies trying to build the momentum, development firms such as 37signals [37signals.com] would not be as successful as they have been. Not to mention, the fact that the functionality of the RoR framework has or is being ported to many other languages of late.

I'm not trying to convince you it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't see the logic behind swearing Ruby on Rails off before even looking under the hood for yourself...

Re:Is Rails useful to aggregate web services?

[stevenprentice]

Rails is useful in so many ways. Rails is a very cohesive collection of components that make up a complete web development platform, but it is easy to use the indivdual components standalone.

For example, I've used ActiveRecord by itself for database access. The application was a simple command-line utility that interacted with a local database. No web development, but ActiveRecord made it extremely easy to interact with the db.

Another example, I've used ActionView and ActionController without ActiveRecord to create a non-database driven website. I did this to take advantage of the controller/routing features of ActionController and the layout and templating features of ActionView.

Very useful stuff--either together or as separate components.

Dear Slashdot

[VAXGeek]

Dear Slashdot:

                At this point, I am quite aware of Ruby on Rails. It is agile, the next big thing, etc. Could you possibly link a few more half brewed articles about AJAX, Ruby, and Rails? "Ruby's the next big thing!" "Ruby's hot!" Wow, really?! It certainly has more hype than anything else out there. I think if it was really that good, there would be less people hyped about it and more people actually using it. I've heard about 50000 people say it is the next perl. Of course, with perl6 highly late, who knows what will happen.

Re:we already know

[I Like Pudding]

That and you might actually get a chance to architect it. I maintain a large web app, and hate the fact that I can't go in redesign anything (everything).

Re:YASLFFFSC

[Anonymous Coward]

Basecamp is being "used by tens of thousands of people in over 40 countries!"

Not simultaneous, which is what scalability implies.

I could write a puching-card operated server that would allow 5,743,743,798 from all over the universe have access to it, if they stand in a line and wait.

You know why I'm not trying it?

[James A. Y. Joyce]

Because every single fucking article I've read about Ruby on Rails is 95% hype and 5% substance. If the Ruby on Rails evangelists can't even be bothered to spend 15 minutes writing a decent article to actually explain what it is and how it works, why the fuck would I go to the trouble of installing Ruby and learning how to use it "On Rails"?

The ultimate contrarian answer to this question

[hey!]

Is that there is no answer. At least no answer that is ten words or less and covers every possible case.

People who say that business logic never belongs in the database are people who tend to be application developers. They are committed to a client platform (say j2ee), and database platforms (oracle and postgres and the like) vary from client to client.

People who own data on the other hand tend to have the database platform constant, but need to get at it and manipulate it from multiple platforms (j2ee, perl, VB, Access etc.) A viable definition of "database" in my book is a collection of data that is organized to be reused across apps.

A choice algorithm I'd use is this: If it has to do with the logical consistency of the data, it belongs in the database tier. If it is only possible to meet the needs of the project you are doing in one way, choose that way. Otherwise decide what part of your system is least likely to change, try to put as much as you can there.

The closest I can get to my self imposed ten word limit is this:

Business logic belongs in the tier you're most committed to.

Re:Finally, a breath of fresh air

[Krimszon]

I can't feel frameworks take away my control. It's like I want to do all those things myself, even though I know I can't do it as good as them. Also, I don't know if I can ever really understand what it is, only that I have to type something like :scaffold whatever and I'll hit the ground running. Wonderful, but...

I feel like the real skill of development lies in making stuff like that, and if it becomes defacto, all you do is build applications from building blocks. I feel it takes away some of the 'art' of development. You'd say, oh I build a nice webshop, and the other person would sya, what did you use, and your answer wouldn't be php, mysql, some html/css and javascripting. It'd be Ruby on Rails, of Smarty Templates combined with some Data Access layer, or a whole lot of those java spring/hibernate thingies. And all you did was tie up the ends.

I know it makes no sense not to use it, it's much a better choice. Make more money, easier, faster. But still, there's that feeling, know what I mean?

Not True!

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, it really depends on which axis has what label. If EFFORT is on the vertical and KNOWLEDGE is on the horizontal, then the saying is absolutely right. And, uh, i've never heard anyone be explicit about the labelling, so i'll have to assume your just a little pernacious.

i mean, the above holds water, yeah? Anyway hello there, fellow nitpicker :)

j.

Re:Trails: RoR for Java

[irritating environme]

Trails was a train wreck of immaturity last time I checked, and the dependencies were ridiculous.

There is also Grails which is Groovy based, that is probably immature as hell.

Ruby's main problem is its immaturity, so going with a more immature solution doesn't help. Java for the sake of Java isn't going to help things, but I wish the Grails/Trails people great success. The Java API is extremely valuable, and Ruby's main problems with converting people is the host of apps/APIs (web server, database, etc) above and beyond the language that an enterprise developer will need to learn in order to effectively use it.

Re:I bet it does it all by convention...NOT!

[Watts Martin]

ActiveRecord isn't a code generator. The scaffolding scripts are code generators. ActiveRecord is an ORM system. In fact, AR doesn't generate any code at all, which makes it hard to believe you've even given the Active Record Overview [rubyonrails.com] a quick glance. The "convention over configuration" magic is one listed feature out of a dozen.

Yes, ActiveRecord is immature, and yes, it's clearly designed more with the idea of being used from the ground up. But, see, when you start slagging off AR because it's "just" something that it doesn't even do...