Re: Ruby On Rails on the iSeries

Perhaps a few of  my observations about WDSC and EGL comes across as FUD, but 
that's probably true  in any point/counter-point discussion.  I've just been 
getting in to WDSC  lately, myself.  Colleagues in our local users group have 
remarked about updates  destabilizing their PCs.
  
 Perhaps if you  have enough memory and CPU it's not a problem.  That's been 
the standard answer  for PC environments for a couple of decades.  But we may 
be entering an era  where less, instead of more, is better.  PC's have been a 
democratizing force,  but the Internet is an even bigger democratizing force, 
leading to the  possibility of rich-thin user interfaces at the client level, 
supported by  powerful servers anywhere on the grid.
  
 I apologize for  the number of times I've talked about the program at MIT, 
named One Laptop Per  Child, which has a goal of deploying millions of low-cost 
laptops to students  around the world, with the hope of enabling them to 
wirelessly connect to the  grid for applications and information.  We could 
eventually see a movement away  of powerful desktop systems, in favor of more 
rugged, portable, lightweight,  scaled-back units.  Low-cost devices that are 
somewhere in between a PC and a  terminal.  What a remarkable, democratizing 
force that would  be!
  
 We may be on the  verge of seeing lightweight Linux based devices, running 
cool 500 MHz  processors, using USB drives and Flash memory, a browser and a 
few essential  applications onboard, instead of the tendency of packing nearly 
every kind of  device imaginable into desktop and laptop PCs, along with 
correspondingly  bloated operating systems and applications that feed on that 
kind of  power.
  
 The iSeries is  positioned well to have a place in that kind of world.  We may 
be seeing the crest of  oversized desktop development and runtime environments.
  
 Compare an open  source environment like Rails, where somebody contributes a 
script to generate a  shell for an application that implements some sort of 
model for database  maintenance, to a tool that uses a tightly coupled WYSIWYG 
editor and 4GL  language to generate 3GL languages and user interfaces.  They 
may call that  enterprise development, but with a tool like Rails, some kid in 
Thailand is  going to whip out a comparable application in half the time, using 
his $100  laptop, and deploy it for anyone having access to the  Internet.
  
 Nathan  Andelin


----- Original Message ----
From: Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 2:43:11 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Ruby On Rails on the iSeries

I don't want to really get into a debate here, but I do have to answer a few
of these points.

Take the time to work with Rails and you'll find that it, like many other
frameworks, is simply a fast way to do certain things.  And while some of
the concepts may seem cool at first, I find the conventions to eventually be
too restrictive for enterprise programming.  For example, you need to
remember to name your tables plurally.  A reference to another table is the
SINGULAR of that table name with "_id" concatenated.  You don't HAVE to
follow this convention, but you lose some benefits if you don't.

It has some neat features, and it is more complete than some of the other
frameworks, but the exact same components exist for many other languages,
such as Perl.  The "programming by convention" is perhaps a nicety for
people who don't like to type, but I've never been particularly enamored by
something that magically figures out code based on naming conventions;
inevitably I need to break the naming convention and bad things happen.

Moving on, your bit about EGL being heavy is just silly.  WDSC is certainly
heavy, but that's because it's a full-fledged IDE.  Ruby on Rails, for
example, is a primarily text-based scripting environment.  Try renaming
something in Ruby and see if it automatically fixes every reference.

EGL, on the other hand, is about as light a framework as I've seen.  You
define data elements with as much (or as little) metadata as you want, group
those data elements into records, and then use the records to build your UI
and your database access.  Specify something as a key field in a record and
it is used as a key in database access and is protected in the UI when
updating a record.  It's simple, clean and really fast.

I'd also like to dispel some of your WDSC FUD.  Yes, WDSC updates are large.
As are iSeries cumes.  That's because they're large products, and if a
monthly download of a GB is too much for you, then you ought to find another
platform.  Also, you can download the updates and then apply them later, so
you don't have to "worry about the network going down".  Finally, it's been
a long time since a WDSC update destabilized my workbench... and I do a LOT
of work with WDSC.

When is the last time you saw someone do an update that actually broke their
working environment?

Anyway, enough of this.  There's nothing wrong with Ruby.  Or Tapestry, or
Turbine and Velocity, or Zope, or Laszlo, or any of a number of other
frameworks out there.  Me, I prefer an environment that will allow me to
quickly build a thin framework that will in turn access RPG, and JSP Model
II is the answer for that.

The question is whether EGL provides the productivity for JSP Model II that
Visual Studio provides for .NET, and my initial take on it is that it is
headed in the right direction.

Joe