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Ajax On Rails 235

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-you-hack-it dept.
mu-sly writes "Ajax and Rails - probably two of the biggest buzzwords in web development at the moment. In this article over at ONLamp, Curt Hibbs introduces the incredibly powerful Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's a great read, and serves as a gentle introduction to the cool stuff you can accomplish with ease using the Ajax features of Rails."
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Ajax On Rails More

Ajax On Rails

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  • Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by newdamage ( 753043 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:33AM (#12788622) Homepage Journal
    I'm sure many developers like myself have a day job that probably involves J2EE. The first time I did the iniitial tutorials for Rails several weeks ago I was blown away. Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.

    Even when using newer frameworks like Spring, Tapestry and Hibernate (I hate you so much Struts) Rails still manages to be easier.

    I highly suggest any developers looking for a change of pace at least give Ruby on Rails a few hours of your evening. While it's not nearly as comprehensive as Java, it's gaining libraries and functionality by leaps and bounds.

    And just so I don't get labeled as a Rails fanboy/Java basher: Rails is not perfect, I still would recommend using J2EE for large corporate projects. It's just a much more mature solution with less unknowns. I think Rails needs another year at least before people are ready to really give it a shot in the corporate environment.
    • I've not tried RoR from a development perspective (I have no need/desire to write web apps), but from a user perspective it rocks! Well done Javascript can be a nice user experience, but sites that need regular reloading rarely use it, the main exception I can think of being Gmail.

      RoR, IMHO, is a major step forward to web deployed applications becomming mainstream.
    • I'm sure many developers like myself have a day job that probably involves J2EE. The first time I did the iniitial tutorials for Rails several weeks ago I was blown away. Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.

      Damn right! Databases all ought to be like Oracle, where even typing in a query is a hellish quest involving obscure replacements for DNS (tnsnames), client software that's incompatible when even a minor versionnumber changes, convoluted connectstrings and non-gui client tools (un

      • And since you're paying thousands of dollars for this database the command-line based client should under NO circumstances be easy to use! Do not allow command line history, or the ability to edit the line you're working on!

        Seriously, I don't know how Oracle gets away with sqlplus... Would it be *that* hard to add readline support?
      • Got that right.

        Oracle's "brilliant" product for developers - Developer 2000 - involved TWO - count 'em! - TWO 800 page books on how to develop forms.

        Forms which have absolutely NO WAY to be documented as to how they are constructed (other than printing out individual screens of trigger code and the like.)

        One of the most pathetically incompetently designed products I've ever seen.

        Anybody who uses Oracle (other than the database itself - with nothing else) is out of their minds.
    • Ruby is easier. Until you try to do something even moderately complex.

      Our company recently tried to do a web-project (workflow management application for a publishing house) based RoR. It was a spectacular failure - LOTS of things are mostly absent from RoR: caching and transaction support, object-relational mapping is inferior (yes, ActiveRecord is NOT enough), etc.

      RoR is nice, but it needs lots of polishing and some redesign. In its present state RoR can't be compared with J2EE solutions, they are far m

      • Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:5, Informative)

        by sucresemoule123 ( 462966 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:43AM (#12788852) Homepage
        RoR has caching : here [rubyonrails.com] and supports transactions : here [rubyonrails.com]
        • How about distributed caching (SwarmCache, Tangasol, Memcached)? How about optimistic locking based on timestamps (it is still absent and we needed it BADLY)?

          And Ruby's transaction support is very limited, for example it's impossible to detach record from a transaction, save it to session and then reattach this record to a new transaction (with concurrency control based on timestamps/verisons, of course). Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org/ [hibernate.org]) supports this, BTW.

      • Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:44AM (#12788858) Homepage Journal
        hmmmmm troll alert?

        Ruby can't do complex things java can??? You meant rails, probably, and such confusion of terms is not a good sign.

        Have you checked out the latest rails versions' API? I see transaction support and caching of db data and cgi actions too.

        As for the 'inferior' object relational mapping: indeed Active record tries to keep things simple: I'm grateful for it. Rails developers got too far sometimes, as you see if you have a column named 'type' in your tables ;)
        But, that's not being inferior, it's being different. If your app requires convolute mappings, either extend active record to suit your needs or do without it (possibly dropping rails altogether and wasting precious ram with a JVM ;) ).
        • So what you're saying is that RoR is becoming more complex as it tries to handle the complex things J2EE has to handle? There is a certain irreducable amount of complexity in writing enterprise software (whatever that is). Frameworks that try to support this completely generally become more and more complex themselves until they reach J2EE levels. The vast majority of the "complicated" things in J2EE are in there because they are needed to solve real world problems. Anything that attempts to solve the same
          • You should probably read this paper on scripting [pacbell.net]
            The moral is, no matter how complex a system build on Ruby will get, it will always be more simple to use than a system build on Java, just because Java carries the characteristics of a systems programming language while Ruby carries the characteristics of a scripting programming language.
            • Scripting is not a holy grail. The only fundamentall advantage of scripting is name-based polymorphism (i.e. dynamic dispatch), it allows you to skip extracting common interfaces in your object model. As the software grows this advantage soon becomes negligible, and may even turn to disadvantage, because you'll have to find and isolate general interfaces manually.
              • No, the fundamental advantage of dynamic languages is programmer productivity. You can accomplish a goal in a dynamic language like Scheme, Smalltalk, Python, or Ruby in 100 lines that would require 500 or more lines of Java. That's also an advantage when you have to modify the code--there's less of it and it's faster and easier to read as a result. It's also much simpler and faster to create unit tests in dynamic languages, leading to more and faster testing of projects. These advantages grow with the
        • Ruby is Turing complete, so it can do any thing that Java can do.

          I'm just saying that Ruby in its current state can't really handle complex web-applications. I don't say anything about future RoR versions.

          Active record tries to keep things simple, yes. But sometimes things just can't be simple: we've had lots of problems with cascaded deletes/updates, inverse mappings and bi-directional structures. Finally, we just used Active records like a plain SQL query engine with little additional benefit.
          • I'm just saying that Ruby in its current state can't really handle complex web-applications.

            By saying "Ruby doesn't have ____" and being shown to be wrong? Heh.

            As for being able to handle complex web apps, depends on your definition, I suppose. I'd certainly consider things like Basecamp [basecamphq.com] to be a "complex web app," but perhaps Java lets sites like that remotely read your mind using ESP or something else nifty.

      • Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:5, Informative)

        by zorander ( 85178 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @10:42AM (#12789045) Homepage Journal
        Enterprise software is a different game. Rails is pretty all around terrible at integrating with non-rails-intended database schemas which are plentiful in any enterprise situation.

        I'm going to overlook the fact that a flexible caching mechanism has been in place since pre-snowdevil (maybe february) and transaction support was added at some point before the last time I worked with rails (late april). Keep in mind that it's still pre-1.0 and beta and not yet feature-complete. Criticizing it for a lack of features it supports, though, is in poor taste.

        Furthermore, almost all rails development at this point has been executed using very small (5 people) core teams. J2EE supports large scale development because it was designed for it. Rails was designed to let a relatively small number of people write an agile application using the set of paradigms which rails was built on. Coming at it from an "I use java in the enterprise and couldn't plug rails in its place tomorrow" is a little bit unfair, because in the same sense, I couldn't just drop J2EE onto my own desktop and start developing with it tomorrow. (Not to mention that my boss would not even begin to authorize such an expenditure for one developer on one product).

        I see rails more as a contender to PHP than to J2EE. J2EE and rails are not really comparable in the same market. Sure, rails beats the crap out of J2EE when you've got 1-3 developers on the project, and inversely, when there's more than 10, J2EE has a clear advantage. Coming from java, you're likely to miss many of the benefits of metaprogramming in rails. Even coming from python (a somewhat similar language to ruby), I was a bit startled at some of the techniques being used.

        Your project might have failed, but I'm not sure it was completely rails that caused it. AR is very easily extensible (in a matter of hours, usually) to do all sorts of more enterprise-java-like things. Ruby's dynamic messaging and open classes makes that a much simpler affair than it would be in java. Why didn't you extend it to meet your needs? Also, how did you miss the fact that caching and transactions have been there for a while? Were you trying to shoehorn rails onto an old schema? Did you have prior ruby programming experience or were you learning as you went? Did you have prior experience in a dynamically typed language writing an app of similar complexity? Nothing is going to make the solution of a hard problem easy. Some things can make it more pleasant, if used correctly.

        • Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:04AM (#12789117)
          Were you trying to shoehorn rails onto an old schema?

          This, I think, is the crux.

          My company has a library, too, that makes certain assumptions about the DB. We're really wicked-fast when using it, when building an app from the gound up. It has hooks for overriding some assumptions, so we can shoe-horn it in to some other projects. But if the DB is hopeless, the game is over, and we have to do things like everyone else.

          And nearly every company out there has a hopelessly messy DB, that can't be refactored because of X, where X is legacy apps, no money, management resistance, [...]

          Hell, even Hibernate/middlegen has a problem related to this: all it takes is one clueless app developer that scorns DB constraints, and you have a Situation that can cost 10s of K to fix.

          Rails is neat (I'm a pretty big perl bigot, and I like it), but it isn't designed for integration. Folks playing around with it should recognize that up front, so that they don't try to do the wrong thing with it.

        • Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @11:21AM (#12789212)
          First, you have some misconeptions about J2EE.

          True, you can't just drop J2EE on your desktop because there's no such _thing_ as J2EE. J2EE is a set of standards (which contains just about everything).

          The only things you need to start developing J2EE applications are: Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html [apache.org]), optionally a web-framework (like http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/index.html [apache.org]) and you can start developing tomorrow (if you know Java of course) and a decent IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/ [eclipse.org]). It will cost you about $0.

          Java has some metaprogramming featues starting from version 1.5. Right now we're writing application in C++ and Python, so I don't miss metaprogramming features :)

          RoR is extensible, but some features are just very hard to implement: maintaning persistent object identity, complex mappings support, distributed caching and long-running transactions with optimistic locking.

          We had previous expirience in dynamic languages (Python, Perl, PHP). This project was a sort of expirement - we wanted to see what can be done with RoR.
      • Go for zope. All you're mentioning is already built (internal, or extension products):
        workflow, caching, object based database, transaction, etc. I don't know if it's easier than Java, but it's easy enough for me.
      • > Ruby is easier.

        yes

        > Until you try to do something even moderately complex.

        nothing is easy when it's complex

        > caching

        nope, its there

        > transaction support

        yep it's weak.

        > object-relational mapping is inferior

        Isn't any OR mapper slow/bloated and really just a starting point?

        > RoR is nice

        yes :)

        > but it needs lots of polishing and some redesign.

        it's not 1.0 yet

        > In its present state RoR can't be compared with J2EE solutions, they are far more powerfull and _flexible_.

        I don

        • No, you hold the hype for 3 months. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Some Random Username ( 873177 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:04PM (#12789427) Journal
          I am sick of seeing this excuse. You can't run around the internet screaming how rails is the greatest thing since the wheel, and how it renders java obsolete because its 100x faster to work with, and then say "its not done" when people actually try to use it. If you are ready to hype something and tell everyone how great it is, then you need to be ready to accept criticism too. If we can't compare it yet because it isn't finished, then stop running around telling us how great it is and how we should all be using it.
    • If only Rails applications (and Ruby) could be compiled for the JVM and run in a J2EE application server...

      I guess what I really want is a Java equivalent of Rails. Java On Crutches or something like it.

      P.S. Slashdot just said:
      Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

      It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

      Fucktards.
    • As a long time J2EE developer, I hear ya. I did a lot of investigation and experimentation with RoR, for the very reasons you listed. I tried out some of the tutorials and was amazed at how fast it was to get something going and how little code/configuration there was to write. I think RoR is on to something, but is way,way off from being anything other than a great prototyping tool right now.

      It uses a lot of assumptions and works best with MySQL. Once you start using it with a legacy database and start

    • I've been working with struts as of late, and although setting things up can be a little tedious, what specifically don't you like about it?

    • Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.



      Neither should it be to wipe out your database by setting the rake testing database to the same as you store your important data in.

  • Substitute for s (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fa2k ( 881632 )
    Can this again help reducing bandwidth consumption in a similar, but prettier way, than html frames?
    • Yes, as the article points out. Ajax has also a problem in common with html frames, as it's difficult to associate content to an uri. The article covers this, too.

      BTW I recommend giving rails a try, it's really a well thought out environment for your web apps. The site linked in my sig is a quick and dirty powerdns + lighttpd + rails experiment on a debian UML host (still on 2.4)

  • Ruby on Rails as a threat to PHP? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:40AM (#12788642) Homepage Journal
    Every time I see material surrounding Ruby on Rails, I'm further convinced that it could be the web application programming foundation that starts to displace PHP as developers start to look at the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5. Getting an increased install base for ruby on rails, as is the case with php (a fairly difficult task, admittedly) would definitely help no end in increasing the framework's popularity, at least amongst those programming smaller web applications.
    • he transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.

      And what transition would that be, excatly? PHP5 is almost completely back-compatible with PHP4.

  • Rails book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf (Score:4, Informative)

    by gavri ( 663286 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:43AM (#12788651)
    Get the Beta book http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/index. html [pragmaticprogrammer.com] If you're interested in Rails at all, this book is all you need.

    • Re:Rails book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf (Score:5, Informative)

      by mav[LAG] ( 31387 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:21AM (#12788783)
      Agreed 100%. I bought it last week. Don't be fooled by its "beta" status - it's a thoroughly well written introduction to Rails that takes you through everything you need to know - including building a REAL application (a shopping cart) from start to finish.

      I also bought Programming Ruby by the same author because I want to do more with Ruby than just Rails, but this isn't necessary for those who just need Rails - all Ruby constructs and idioms are cross-referenced with an included introduction to the language.

    • As mentioned in Curt's great article, the Agile Web Development with Rails (beta) book has a nice chapter on Ajax support. You can even get an extract of the chapter at the pragmatic programmer's site: PDF Extract of Chap 18: Web 2.0 [pragprog.com]

      Figure 18.1 should make Ajax clear. The book is highly recommended, and the 2nd Beta was just released last week.

  • Which is the bigger irony: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:43AM (#12788654) Homepage Journal
    Then Microsoft created XMLHttpRequest in Internet Explorer 5, which let browser-side JavaScript communicate with the web server in the background without requiring the browser to display a new web page. That made it possible to develop more fluid and responsive web applications. Mozilla soon implemented XMLHttpRequest in its browsers, as did Apple (in the Safari browser) and Opera.
    XMLHttpRequest must have been one of the Web's best kept secrets. Since its debut in 1998, few sites have used it at all, and most developers, if they even knew about it, never used it. Google started to change that when it released a series of high-profile web applications with sleek new UIs powered by XMLHttpRequest.
    a) Microsoft as a first-mover in a technology, or
    b) Microsoft's own technology being used by Google to loosen Redmond's deathgrip on the market?
    • Then Microsoft created XMLHttpRequest in Internet Explorer 5, which let browser-side JavaScript communicate with the web server in the background without requiring the browser to display a new web page.

      This isn't quite correct. IFrame and hidden IFrame communication was invented before that. The catch is that browsers weren't stable enough or compatible enough to make use of these channels.

      XMLHttpRequest does more or less the same thing as an IFrame (via an ActiveX contarol), except that it adds the over

    • Microsoft's own technology being used by Google to loosen Redmond's deathgrip on the market

      This is nothing new to Microsoft - they have long been creating tools for their own competitors. Microsoft create a platform and sell development tools for the platform. However MS is also an ISV for that same platform (e.g. MS Office). Hence there is an inherent conflict of interest - the platform side is developing and selling the tools that will be used by competitors to compete with the ISV side.

      This is one o

  • Dont Forget Zope (Score:4, Insightful)

    by salimfadhley ( 565599 ) <ip@@@stodge...org> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:47AM (#12788666) Homepage Journal
    Of course Rails isnt the only completely F/OSS web application framework; Rails is best when you want to put relational data online: It's edge is it's simplicity.

    On the other hand remember Zope - If you can get your head around Aqusition, the ZODB and Product Deveopment then Zope is a super-fast development platform.

    • Re:Dont Forget Zope (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ranger ( 1783 )
      If you can get your head around Aqusition[sic], the ZODB and Product Deveopment[sic] then Zope is a super-fast development platform.

      I recenty became the web administrator at a small university and the college I work for uses Zope. I knew a little Zope and Python beforehand and it helped me get the job. I was all hot and heavy to switch them to a PHP/MySQL solution, though my first love is Perl. Doing stuff in PHP was fast. As I studied Zope and Python more and more I came to realize that my initial impre

  • it's an illusion alright (Score:4, Funny)

    by udderly ( 890305 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:48AM (#12788668)
    From the article:The most visually impressive of these is Google Maps, which gives you the illusion of being able to drag around an infinitely sizable map in its little map window.

    It's illusory alright, when I start at the US and scroll due west the first thing that I come to is the UK. Where'd all the other countries go?
  • Ajax grew from one of those hated, non-standard Microsoft features.

    • Um, was that actually hated by anybody? Did anybody know about it except Microsoft?

      I think IE is hated for its complete lack of support for just about anything standard and less so for ITS non-standard features - especially the one nobody knew about (until it became useful.)

  • AJAX meme (Score:3, Informative)

    by broward ( 416376 ) <browardhorne@NOspaM.gmail.com> on Saturday June 11, 2005 @08:53AM (#12788681) Homepage
    The rise in AJAX is almost solely due to the recent AdaptivePath article. I'm not sure it's a major trend.

    http://www.realmeme.com/miner/technology/ajaxDejan ews.png [realmeme.com]

    However, Ruby on Rails is clearly rising,
    moving steadily upward for over a year. Thanks to a reader for bringing this to my attention.

    http://www.realmeme.com/miner/technology/hibernate vsrubyDejanews.png [realmeme.com]

    • Re:AJAX meme (Score:4, Informative)

      by shashark ( 836922 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:19AM (#12788776)
      From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX [wikipedia.org]

      There have been some critics of the term AJAX, claiming that the Adaptive Path [wikipedia.org] consultancy who created it [com.com] are using it as a marketing vehicle (and as a meme [wikipedia.org]) for previously used techniques [25hoursaday.com]

      It has been pointed out that the AJAX technologies did not have a common name before, and that some welcome a unifying term for the process. However it is also reported that the Google engineers who have created the most prominent applications using this technique consider their technologies as 'Javascript'

      AJAX is not a new approach of building software. From a higher perspective the presentation layer is like a form and a programming layer behind handling the events, commonly known in programming terms as MVC [wikipedia.org]. This kind of programming is very well known in older programming environments like Delphi, MFC, Visual Basic, Oracle ADF, and Windows Forms, just to name a few. Applications using this model of programming have been around for years: Microsoft Outlook Web Access using WebDAV and the Web based ERP system P2plus using web services directly from the browser. However, because there are no standards available for the communication model behind previous implementations, all use proprietary extensions.

      A new aspect to AJAX is that there are now multiple browsers that can be used to realize this type of application, as opposed to earlier technologies which were frequently limited only to Microsoft's [wikipedia.org] Internet Explorer [wikipedia.org].

    • AJAX is just a catchy name cooked up by a few guys and embraced by O'Reilly, who no doubt are in the works with about 2 dozen books on the topic.

  • Rails changes the whole Web development game (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:21AM (#12788784) Homepage Journal
    Most of this product comparison site [godefy.com] was developed in Ruby on Rails within the last two months, and it already does more than Froogle, has more search features, etc.

    I've also developed a large marketing system for the restaurant industry in Rails which lets restauranteurs develop e-cards, e-gifts, and send them to their customers on certain days.. or certain days away from their birthdays, etc.. and that will be going fully live soon.

    My 10,000 user strong RSS Digest [bigbold.com] will be making the leap to Rails soon (July 1st) and this is a system driving over half a million uses a day.

    I developed a del.icio.us-style tagged Code Snippets [bigbold.com] site in Rails within two days! It's had further refinements since then, but less than two weeks after launch, it was getting thousands of pageviews a day and hundreds of visitors a day from Google.

    I was ready to give up development work 6 months ago, and now it's the most fun and profitable work out there for me. Ruby on Rails deserves the attention it's getting. You can put together your ideas in a fraction of the time you'd have ever imagined.
  • First thing this title reminded me of was Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke. That chick does a couple rails of ajax that Chong was cuttin up for fun. I was surprised no one else posted about it.

  • Will that be 5 or 10 years experience? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GoofyBoy ( 44399 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:37AM (#12788835) Journal
    Time to add Ajax and Rails on my resume!

    (To all potential employeers: I kid!)

    • Hell, I was doing AJAX back in my System/32 RPG II days!

      (Yeah, right! Ajax cleanser, maybe...)

      (As an aside, I just read some article about some major financial company trying to get away from doing RPG II programming on one of their mainframes. I'm like, WHAT? Some asshole is STILL programming in RPG II?)
  • Has the performance of Ruby gotten much better since the early days?

    I started using Ruby a long time ago, back when no one knew about it. I liked it because it was like a better Perl (better OO support but with Perl syntax). However, I quickly tired of its lackluster performance. I mean it was a lot slower than even Perl or Python. I eventually moved on hoping to return when Rudy had matured and performance was kicking. Last time I checked the performance was the same as always. So much for the "tune
    • Matz is well aware of the speed problems, and unlike ruby zealots is at least willing to admit that its a problem, and plans to make ruby2's performance competitive with perl and python.
    • Ruby's still about half the speed of Perl.

      Whether that's a good tradeoff for faster development and less maintenance time is, of course, a matter of opinion.

  • Get the book (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ridgelift ( 228977 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @09:46AM (#12788865)
    I first heard of Ruby on Rails here on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. Although Rails is dead simple once you get it, getting to the "ah ha" point is a bit of a steep climb.

    If you want to learn Ajax in Rails, the best thing I've read has been Dave Thomas' new book "Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails" [pragmaticprogrammer.com]. The author of Ruby on Rails itself, David Heinemeier Hansson, is also a co-author. Great book, absolutely fantastic web development framework.
  • Would anyone care to post their experiences with any of the libraries - DWR [getahead.ltd.uk], Prototype [conio.net], Sajax [modernmethod.com], and Ajax.NET [schwarz-interactive.de] (i'm not interested in this one at all, but to be fair...) - mentioned in TFA?
    • I used Sajax on a recent project; it was easy to use (only a single php file to include) and worked flawlessly. The only complaint I would make is that it uses neither PHP's nor Javascript's object oriented features, although that could probably be easily hacked together.
  • I'm not a programmer, but someone who pays a programmer to develop a web-application for which PHP is used. It is possible to mix PHP and RoR, making a gradual transition possible? The FA surely mentions types of behaviour I'd like to have. Bert
    • It's possible, but not a good idea. RoR is like a Mac. It thrives on integration. Running the Darwinport of XMMS may work for you, but using iTunes is ultimately the overall better solution.

      Hope that helps.

      (This comes from someone who runs XMMS on a Mac ;)

  • ASP.Net 2.0 (Score:3, Informative)

    by DigitlDud ( 443365 ) on Saturday June 11, 2005 @12:03PM (#12789419)
    ASP.NET 2.0 does this also. You can define client callbacks on web controls which let you run code on the server-side and get the results back without reposting the page.
    http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/35068 96 [developer.com]
    • Well, any Turing complete language can do this too. (some Google engineers like pointing out that the technology they use for googlemaps and gmail is called "javascript", not ajax).

      The advantage of Ruby is the way in which the callbacks are attached to the controls. In C# or J2EE or VB you basically need to create a special type of class to handle the callback, and create an instance of it. In Ruby you basically pass in a code block representing the action you want without having to create new classes

  • Ok. So someone built a webpage with java script rich client features and some server stuff to deal with it. Right? Well, this is as old as the hills. Web developers where doing this 5 years ago.
    But this is called Ajax and suddenly everyone goes crazy.
    Then there is ROR. I checked Ruby on Rails about a year ago. Then again a little more just the other month. It looks like Zopes younger brother. Not half as powerfull, and 5 years to late. But with Ruby, as to add even more extra geekness or what?

    Please unders
    • Actually there are only so many ways to do things, after all you always deal with the same stuff, rails is new, but the concepts are old, and can be found in many other frameworks. The thing about rails is the excellent ruby language behind it which eases many of those constructs found and taken from many other frameworks by the usage of heavy introspection.
  • The little demo they have on ONLamp has a tiny little mention of unchecking a particular checkbox on your MySQL install. You know. To turn off authentication of username/password to login to the database. They claim that MySQL broke authentication in 4.1.9.

    Whatever.

    My DBD::DBI applications are able to athenticate against MySQL just fine, but this app throws large gaudy errors when trying to connect to my (non-crippled) MySQL instance. (Yes, I ran through the tutorial in the hopes that the bug would have a
  • There's a pretty good effort underway to create a PHP framework that works like Rails. Its over at Cake [sputnik.pl] and is surprisingly robust and mature.

    They use the exact same Javascript library that is used in Rails as well: Prototype [conio.net].

    Rails is pretty decent. I guess the only issue is performance... you pretty much have to count out your typical web hosting account and have your own server. Mod_ruby [modruby.net] pretty much takes care of the performance issues and it installed without incident in my Apache 2.xx web server wi

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