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Programming IT Technology

Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released 332

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.
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Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released

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  • by cytoman ( 792326 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:22PM (#14252813)
    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.
  • by cerelib ( 903469 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:26PM (#14252833)
    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"
    • by Anonymous Coward
      It's a new kind of digital "red" cocaine, made by processing coca leaves with iron phosphate and coating the result with a light silicone mist on which nano-transistors can be printed. The resulting product produces, when smoked or inhaled -- hence the "rails" component of the name -- a new style of e-high, where you're able to either interface hallucinogenic side effects with your iTunes graphical output, or you can join any IP-based E-HI network and select topics for your stoned brain to mull over. Watch
    • Well, the point is, we've seen "it just works" turn out not to work, so who's to say that "it mostly works" is any more of a truthful statement? I'd rather have them say here it is, it's free, try it out, and take the opinion of an impartial third party.
    • Mostly right (50.01%) * Most of the time (50.01%) * most of the people (50.01%) = 12.50%.

      I'm not sure I'd want a product that is stated to work a minimum 12.50% of the time.

      Either that, or maybe I need to not take the worst-case-scenario when listening to product descriptions -- though it's worked for me in the past.
  • Er (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trip Ericson ( 864747 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:30PM (#14252860) Homepage
    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.
    • An application server that takes a slightly diferent approach -- recipes, etc. Personally, I prefer Zope, though Ruby is not a band language.
    • Re:Er (Score:5, Informative)

      by BrynM ( 217883 ) * on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:33PM (#14252879) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Ahem... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mcrbids ( 148650 )
        Well, I'm always curious. So, I watched the video "Evolving your database schema without sweat". I watched for 10-15 minutes where the guy types furiously for 15 minutes to avoid typing "alter table add author varchar".

        I guess I just don't get it. What's the excitement?

        You can't abstract too far away from the database when you get into big, complex tables and want to keep performance up. I've seen a 30-second query reduced to 50 milliseconds merely by changing the order of join in a large, complex, 12-table
        • but what about code changes dependent on changes to the database schema?

          That's the whole point of migrations - they allow you to migrate a database schema up and down quickly to match the code base. (presumably the code base has the migration in it, so it can match the DB) This way you can keep track of the changes during development.

          Plus, the migration code will write the SQL for different databases. Quite handy, since the syntax is somewhat different between mysql and postgresql. (and others)
    • Re:Er (Score:3, Funny)

      by ucahg ( 898110 )
      Ruby on Rails is a fantastic new software-only method of transferring precious stones between countries, states, provinces, cities, and territories via train. .. .. ..

      Or you could just go to the ruby-on-rails website instead of asking for some random's opinion on slashdot.
    • Watch this video (Score:5, Informative)

      by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:35PM (#14252891)
      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 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry.matt54@nosPAm.yahoo.com> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:27PM (#14253125)
        Since the web site is slashdotted (and the video too) could you explain what it is and why someone would want to use it?
        • by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @11:17PM (#14253333) Homepage
          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!
        • Okay now. That were 120 characters.

          Seriously, would you rather type 120 characters than punching in CTRL+T TAB r u b y SPACE o n SPACE r a i l s ENTER TAB*17 ENTER? That's only 33 key presses and at the end you'll know what RoR is.

          Don't tell me you're still sitting on you chair wondering. Gee.
    • Re:Er (Score:3, Informative)

      by Btarlinian ( 922732 )

      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.

      Ruby on Rails is a web development framework. It provides a library for Ruby so it can be used with web development allowing it to be used in applications normally reserved for other languages.

      Slashdot's big on this kind of stuff today. First the Java/everything else flamewar and now this (admittedly no flamewar.)

    • Re:Er (Score:2, Informative)

      by noamsml ( 868075 )
      Ruby on Rails is a web application delvelopement framework built with Ruby. It includes a set of tools to direct and interpert URLs in a smart way, a bunch of database libraries making database backed apps really easy to make, and a bunch of misc tools that help web developers around stuff.
    • "Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration."

      so, it's mainly for giving the coder his jollies, what?
      • by soundofthemoon ( 623369 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @01:42AM (#14254054)
        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.
    • Its the next thing you put on your resume claiming that you have 5+ years experience in.
  • When? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by E IS mC(Square) ( 721736 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:37PM (#14252907) Journal
    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!
    • Given the conservative nature of most "enterprises" I'd say it will take another year or two. Look how long it took them go from COBOL to Java.
    • Don't forget that Java had Sun's marketing gorilla behind it. The industry was bombarded by Java hype, and thus people became very, very aware of it.

      Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, has the force of the community behind it. It has become well-known due to word of mouth.

      From my experience, many IT developers choose not to partake in software development after work. They'd rather to skiing, or watch TV, or play sports. Thus they tend to learn about new technologies only when their firm sends them to a traini
    • Re:When? (Score:4, Informative)

      by w42w42 ( 538630 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:49PM (#14253224)

      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.

    • But when would it get enough traction to be used as a standard framework for web apps at enterprise level?

      The real answer to this is "when people start using it."

      I assume by traction, you mean a large user base so there is a track record of performance/stability. It seems like a chicken/egg type of question: When will enough people use it for people to feel safe using it?

      I say if it meets your needs better than another set-up, use it. And before I get a bunch of drones saying "but the boss has t
    • One word (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @06:41AM (#14254975) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:37PM (#14252909) Homepage
    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?
  • by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:42PM (#14252929)
    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.

    • Few problems with that. First one is momentum. PHP has a large userbase and is currently on version 5.1.1 ... Ruby just announced 1.0. Version numbers don't mean squat except that just hitting 1.0 versus hitting a few version numbers *does* mean something.

      And I hate the people who talk about the "Bad reputation with respect to security." I can write bad code in Perl, Javascript, or C++ if I want. Repeat after me folks, the security of the code is only as good as the competence of the programmer. PHP offers
      • by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:17PM (#14253090)
        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.

        • What aspects of PHP do you think increase security risks, specifically? The major one I know is was the stupid "register_global" idea, which is easily fixed - it's turned off on every host I run.

          Apart from that, what security flaws do you have? SQL-Injection attacks, sure, but then, so does every other language that interacts directly with a database. There are abstraction layers around to avoid that, if you don't trust yourself to examine your incoming data properly.

          I agree that PHP is a poorly designe
    • The main problem I see that's keeping mass adoption is ease of installation of rails apps. PHP apps are extremely simple to install. Nearly all hosting providers support it, and installation is usually comprised of uploading some files to a directory and running an install script. For RoR apps, much special configuration is needed. Even at progressive hosts that have RoR installed, like dreamhost and textdrive, people are currently having immense difficulty getting RoR apps working (look at all of the topic
  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:54PM (#14252982)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @09:56PM (#14252996)
      There is a list of users at:

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

      • by Anonymous Coward
        That's not exactly a flattering list for something that has been available for a year or longer and has been constantly thrown in the faces of developers for that long.

        The funny thing is, all those applications look *exactly the same*, and have no functionality what-so-ever (with the exception of Odeo.)

        Wow, a bunch of <li>'s on a page. That's never been done before.

        You've posted about 50 times in this topic, all with an anti-PHP slant.

        Please, stop posting crap.

        You're not convincing anybody and you sou
    • Does anyone have any experience or views deploying a medium/high volume commercial or enterprise solution using this?

      I personally don't, but BaseCamp is written with RoR.. it's pretty high volume commercial site.

      Penny Arcade is now on RoR.
    • Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com/ [penny-arcade.com] is arguably the highest-traffic site running on Rails. Its design is fairly simple, but it is at least a good example of the loads it can handle (hardware be as it may, scalable is scalable).
  • Will there be another railsday, like the one they had last June?
  • New Look? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bullitB ( 447519 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:04PM (#14253032)
    The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.

    Would that be the "Service Unable: Damn You Slashdot" look?
    • There is no need to spread disinformation. Their site is working just fine. I even cleared my cache, just to be sure that I'm fetching a new copy.

      • Not so fine... it's been loading for the last 60 seconds from my perspective.
        • That could be a problem with your Firefox or Internet Explorer installation.

          I'm using Konqueror, and it takes at most two seconds for their site to load. I cleared and then disabled the browser cache just to ensure that wasn't getting involved.

          I just tried again a few seconds ago, and it's still very responsive, considering the load it is most likely under right now. Pages are loading in 2 seconds, if even that.

          Remember, Ruby on Rails is designed to be very efficient. It's a solid piece of software used by
          • Riight. A "browser problem". With just that site, just right now.

            So anyway, it could be a problem with my cable provider. But then again, I just tried to load it remotely from a machine in Qwest's big midwest hosting facility, right on Qwest's backbone and the main page is taking forever to load.

            I think perhaps you have a transparent cache upstream from you, or you have the images cached some other way. I can get the HTML-only in about 15 seconds with wget, but no images or style sheets.

            It doesn't appear

  • by kstumpf ( 218897 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:14PM (#14253067)
    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.
    • A lot of people have begun moving away from Perl due to the slow development of Perl 6. Many are moving towards Ruby, which has drawn features and functionality quite well from Perl, and is currently moving at a quicker pace.

      Now, that's not to say that Perl 6 may not encounter some degree of success in the future. Perl will most likely always have its users.

      What the Perl 6 community might want to focus on now is developing the technology that will come after Ruby on Rails. Getting a step ahead in the web de
      • Try something for me. Go to a job search engine and search for "ruby". Now try the same thing for "perl". I'll hedge my bets on perl for now.
        • You obviously missed the point. I am talking about Perl 6. I'm not talking about Perl 5 and earlier.

          Of course you'll find more information pertaining to Perl via a search engine. Then again, recall that Perl is older than Ruby, and hit widespread use before Ruby. Your findings are not surprising at all.

    • Jifty is Coming. RSN.

      Make of this what you will.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, more and more people are moving to using DBIx::Class, which is both substantially faster and ridiculously more powerful than Class::DBI. Even has a maintainer who hangs out on the #catalyst and #dbix-class irc.perl.org channels answering questions from users ...
  • by mixonic ( 186166 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:28PM (#14253130) Homepage
    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
    • I heartily suggest that the curious among you check out http://tryruby.hobix.com/ [hobix.com]

      That web page is neat but it's a perfect example of why I'm starting to dislike all this "AJAX" stuff. Nowhere in that tutorial is there any navigation to help me go back if I want to review something again. I hit the back button and it brought me back to your comment, not where I expected to be. I don't know how other people feel but in my opinion breaking the user's back button is the worst web UI mistake that you can

      • While you're right, that tutorial is actually embedding a ruby interpreter on the web page. I don't think it's 'Ajax' that's as much at fault here as the fact that this is doing stupid web browser tricks that, in this case, just happen to be done with Ajax. :)

        IIRC, there's a tutorial out there somewhere telling developers how to make Ajax-happy applications that don't break the BACK button and are bookmarkable.
    • Nice, but it's definitely geared to someone who's never written more than a couple dozen lines. This seems to be true of programming languages in general--no decent language overview available unless you're *really* starting from scratch... I learned Scheme and Java this way, and that was fine, but a few languages later now, it's getting old... I want more than a language reference but less than a thousand-page primer.
    • >> 2 + 2
      An error has occured. Try refreshing this page to reload your session. That's really useful. Anyone gotten this to work?
      That's really useful.
    • That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life! Thanks for the link
  • by porkThreeWays ( 895269 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:31PM (#14253145)
    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.
    • by onlyjoking ( 536550 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @11:07PM (#14253299)
      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.
    • >>The biggest annoyance was automated code generation

      You mean the scaffolding functionality? That's a very very small part of Ruby on Rails and It's one of the most useless ones. Most of the knowledgeable Rails programmers don't use scaffolding at all. It's great for a quick CRUD prototype, but that's about it.

      That's the *only* code generation going on in rails.
    • Um, if you had to spend any considerable amount of time looking for references to database calls in your application when making DB changes I think that's more your fault in doing a poor design rather than any fault of Rails.
    • This is exactly the same concern I have, and I am not that convinced all the automation is really a good thing.

      Anyone with real world experience (i.e. maintenance of complex sites with complex tables where schema changes are frequent and performance tuning is required periodically) can debunk this? Yes I know the Rails site point to a few 'biggish' sites that uses it, but I am interested in hearing from actual developers if these annoyances are real, and how these sort of problems can be dealt with. Maybe w
    • Nitro? (Score:3, Informative)

      Rails isn't the only Web app devel framework that Ruby has... It's just that Rails is getting all of the attention. Some folks prefer Nitro [nitrohq.com] over Rails.
    • by pkphilip ( 6861 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @01:54AM (#14254109)
      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.
    • by l00k ( 910333 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @04:43AM (#14254680)
      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.

    • The autocode generation is meant only to be used initial. Eventually it's usefulness goes away, obviously. So I don't know if I'd find fault with that, personally. My biggest problem is that it relies on FastCGI which blows hard. I've been trying to get that setup, in part to test how easy getting a production environment of rails going is.... um... yeah... not going so well. At least with Tomcat or JBoss you can up and running in minutes. You may not be able to developer your app "10x FASTER", but at leas
  • by jalefkowit ( 101585 ) <(jason) (at) (jasonlefkowitz.com)> on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @10:35PM (#14253159) Homepage
    The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.

    I'm guessing more pastels. And rounded corners.

  • by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @11:28PM (#14253386) Homepage
    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?
  • I always feel like donating something to the Red Cross whenever I hear about Ruby on Rails.. think of the children.
  • 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.
  • 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"
  • by brundlefly ( 189430 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @01:17AM (#14253944)
    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.
  • by rheotaxis ( 528103 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2005 @09:30AM (#14255723) Homepage
    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.

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