Re: Ruby On Rails on the iSeries -- WEB400

Joe--

(wrote this last night, but held off sending it... also not lookingfor a debate, but perhaps can present another view, my friend...)


firstly, a respectful correction, sure you're probably aware that...

dhh is behind rails, while ruby predates rails by over a decade,comes from Japan, etc.

and sure, he's a bit brash (the whippersnapper!) but often alsogetting to and past points many handcuff bound others of alldifferent ages dance around

as my daughter used to say about being spoiled by being the onlygrandchild on both sides of her family for many years, "wouldn't yoube?"

sort of ironic to see much the same reaction to (the idea not so muchas the actuality of) rails as was made in the '90s by many treehuggers about Java

while some saw value right away, others did their level best to denyanything might ever change in the world enough to make Javaappropriate for them - applets suck, and why would I want to write toa jvm when can hit the hardware directly with C++ - it's all aboutshrink wrap and always will be - imo, that's the way of the world,and Nathan hits the nail on the head when he says...

One of the values in discussions like these is that ideas areshared that enable both application developers and tool developersto improve their products. Looking into Rails, and reflecting onit has given me a lot of ideas about things that can be donenatively on the iSeries.

can't say ever did anything directly for corporate clients with OOlanguages and concepts studied in the '90s, beside applying greatideas learned studying them in (go ahead, shudder) AS/SET and goodold RPG - adopted conventions _can_ negate the need for enforcementand move things forward

the value of any mission critical systems will always depend on depthof understanding re: their underlying technology, and the qualitypresent in the approach to implementing

if the technology simplifies, making it easier to understand what'sbeen done while leaving room for handling real complexity, and makesrolling well-considered improvements back into the base reasonable,what's bad about that?

please keep watching rails for a while, as you clearly are, and seeif it isn't evolving quickly in good directions - while dhh is at thecontrols, he's also watching closely for who is contributing andpulling their worthwhile additions into the core, some examples ofadjustments experienced, for example, though not sure of sourcing...


test driven development, baked right in
migrations for handling the inevitably necessary schema evolution

all environments will have growing pains and security flaws, and itis how they are dealt with that matters most - those that hide 'emare the ones to watch out for, as Frank Hayes points out about whatthe VA guy should be saying on the back page of CW this week

the interesting reading on the security flaw was how it was handledand that plays out in a balance in the comments, not in so much inthe original posts - much better response time than most "commercial"environments which can be compared - sure, they probably learned somethings about how to handle the communications outward, but they alsodug in, fixed it and got that out in four days, not next month, forfree - the biggest complainers were anonymous people hiding behind"Commercial Rails Developer" and trying to impress with a number ofservers (imagine that, sound familiar?) while the "clique" (yourword, appropriate FUD?) does the work regardless

small is also the new big, and services will not always be onlyconsulting, sometimes success comes from providing something simplein a new container that lots of folks thought they couldn't afford attheir size

a well harnessed team of caring people in an environment where theycan collaborate, contribute and benefit from peer review, hmm... how_does_ the cathedral stack up vs the bazaar, and why _did_ it make somuch sense to give away the eclipse technology?


perhaps it was contributions and (mostly) continuous improvement

not saying rails is right for everything, but still find myselfworking after hours to understand what's there and apply it to getout from under some adopted personal workloads, and still pleasedwith how it's evolving in my limited time available for same


--Jerome

ps we'll see how lucid can be doing a short demo in september ;D

pps btw, Rails will be in both Leopard client and server releases,quite a 2nd birthday present



On Aug 16, 2006, at 7:28 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:

From: Nathan Andelin

 People are  beginning to wonder if Rails will throw J2EE and .aspx
development on their respective ears. I agree that's prettyimaginative.
How could a few young  programmers, collaborating in an open-source
environment, challenge some of the most powerful corporations onearth?
Before actually beatifying the language you might want to take thetime toread about the security flaw of August 6th, and how the Ruby cliquehandled
it.
This will also introduce you to the inventor of Ruby, the infamous"DHH" (an
example: http://tinyurl.com/nfgxd).  Or read his blog
(http://www.loudthinking.com/).
Then tell me you plan to run your mission critical systems on atool that
depends on this guy.

Joe


--
This is the Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries (WEB400) mailing list
To post a message email: WEB400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/web400
or email: WEB400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/web400.