Ruby On Rails 1.2 Released

Scooter[AMMO] writes "David Heinemeier Hansson sent a post to the Rails 1.2. This new version adds a slew of buff and polish to the rest of the system, as well several new features like RESTful interfaces, response formats, improved multi-byte support, and more. If you haven't checked out the web application framework that aims to renew joy within its users, give it a look. You may be amazed at how easy it makes things without sacrificing power or functionality."

Renew joy?

[Dr. Photo]

I code web apps in rails for work. I come home and play in Django. There is my renewed joy...

I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[mwvdlee]

And after looking at some presentations on their site, I still don't.

All it seems to do is offer a way to do very similar and simplistic web apps without any real-world functionality. I also wonder about the performance and memory profile; seems that the way it handles databases is exactly what DBA's hate to see. Sure, I understand Rails offers you the ability to create websites at high speed, but none of the websites it can create is worthwhile.

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[BlackPignouf]

I really didn't understand either before I decided to invest some time and try tutorials.
It's already been 15 years I've been programming (Logo :), Basic, C++, Fortran, Caml, Java, Ruby ...) and I now have the impression that I never really understood programming before having known rails.
So please, try it at least 2 hours, and you'll be amazed by how fun, efficient and beautiful it is.

Everytime I heard someone talking about REST, migrations, rake, capistrano, scaffolding, ActiveRecord, AJAX, routes & nice URL's, I just thought "Whatever! Those are just buzz/hype words without any meaning, and it won't change my programming life".
But it sure did, and I think noone can ever understand it before giving it a fair chance.

Thanks a lot DHH and keep up the good work!

PS: You might want to check http://backpackit.com/ [backpackit.com] if you look for a "real-world functionality".

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[partenon]

And after looking at some presentations on their site, I still don't.

Some time ago, I was presented to Rails by a friend. I was skeptical at first, but after watching the video, I realize it is a powerful tool. Then, Rails was /.ed by the first time. And the second. And so on. And people still think Rails is only for "database input/output without customization". Can't they see the power behind it?? Something that was so clear to me at very first sight can't be that difficult for others to see. My only explanation to it is that people is afraid of change. And no technology can change that.

While it is very simple to build applications via scaffold (automatic screens base on database schema), it is only *one* feature in Rails. Try it for a week. *Then* you'll see the real power of Rails. Sustainable development speed*, a very nice language (Ruby), nice documentation (it could be better, but it is ok) and so on.

seems that the way it handles databases is exactly what DBA's hate to see

DBA's may hate the way Rails uses databases. The framework isn't focused on "computer ease of computing", but on "developer ease of developing". So, it may not fit for a huge company, w/ hundreds of offshore developers, SA's and DBA's. It is specially useful for small companies/teams, where speed of innovation is their key to get into the market. Example: to start building Rails applications, one just needs to download the ruby interpreter (port install ruby), rubygems (port install rb-rubygems), install rails (gem install rails), and start the application (rails MyApplication). Try that :-)

I also wonder about the performance and memory profile

Its footprint on memory isn't any bigger than a similar application developed in Java. Have you ever looked how much memory the app itself + application server uses? And as for performance, it is ok. This is an old discussion, and rails folks usually says it is better to develop an app in 2 months than 12. And the money for the other 10 months can be used to buy more servers, if needed (but I can tell you that you can handle 4GB of transfer/day in a serverpronto.com entry level machine... warning: it is not a benchmark, just an idea).

All it seems to do is offer a way to do very similar and simplistic web apps without any real-world functionality.

I really hope you aren't serious or you just don't want to open your eyes... Should I send you some examples of sites built using Rails?

So, instead of seeing the presentations, try to put your hands on it w/ rose-colored glasses** . If you don't like it, at least you'll learn new way to do things, which can help you in your next project ;-)

* try to keep a sustainable development speed w/ one of the standards in the market: struts/spring + hibernate. It is almost impossible to achieve.
** sorry, I'm not a native english speaker... I hope it was used in the right context :-)

Heaven help!

[Qbertino]

Now that we've just calmed down the Rails bunch they'll be all over us again with foam aroung their mouths. "RAILS! RUBY! RAAAAH!". ...

Here's a list of very good/better alternatives:
Zope - What Rails want's to be when it grows up. Ancient but still ahead of anything else with classic persistance. (www.zope.org)
django - Drinking buddies of the rails people. And they have unicode support. (www.djangoproject.com)
cakephp - YaWebframework. In PHP. Largest community out there. Impressive piece of code (www.cakephp.org). Some De-Normalisation and Relational Trails built in. Very neat.
symfony - PHP 5 Framework. Very good. (www.symfony-project.com)

The biggest suprise for me was reading right here that Rails, as of version 1.2, doesn't have unicode support - and apparently never had. Now that's showstopper imo.

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[VGPowerlord]

DBA's may hate the way Rails uses databases. The framework isn't focused on "computer ease of computing", but on "developer ease of developing". So, it may not fit for a huge company, w/ hundreds of offshore developers, SA's and DBA's. It is specially useful for small companies/teams, where speed of innovation is their key to get into the market. Example: to start building Rails applications, one just needs to download the ruby interpreter (port install ruby), rubygems (port install rb-rubygems), install rails (gem install rails), and start the application (rails MyApplication). Try that :-)

The last time I used Rails (0.9ish), it wouldn't let you connect to more than one database per application. This is unacceptable in my environment, so I had to throw it out as a prospective tool.

Rails (or rather ActiveRecord) has all the same problems that all ORMs do. The first of which is optimizing for ease of development, not memory footprint. Even medium size applications can suffer from this.

A second problem is the "more information than I asked for" problem. SELECT * should be used sparingly in favor of just grabbing the information that you need. ORMs have no idea of what information you want, so they just grab everything. The more information in your table (i.e. large text fields), the bigger problem that is.

There are other problems as well, but it's 7am here and I need desperately need my morning caffeine fix.

Re:No Mongrel

[lewp]

That's the way I feel about it as well. We use Mongrel for our intranet and it rocks, but I don't need it at all to code on my laptop. I'm glad that Rails doesn't require me to install it, and equally glad that it's basically drop-in when I do want to use it.

OT: I've been looking forward to 1.2 for a while now. I'm glad they got it out the door. Rails and Ruby really do make a lot of tasks much more enjoyable.