Re: Ruby On Rails on the iSeries

Joe,
  
 Any language or  tool not having an interface to RPG and native iSeries 
resources wouldn't meet  your standards for enterprise-level business 
applications, if I understand  correctly.  Even Java alone, wouldn't meet your 
standards, which sounds  reasonable to me.
  
 But Java gained  traction across the world on the premise of "write once, run 
anywhere".  That  premise alone seems to have had incalculable influence on 
people, leading to  expenditures in the hundreds of millions, if not billions 
of dollars, on Java  based solutions, even though odds were that most Java 
projects would settle on  supporting just one platform, usually the lowest 
common denominator - Wintel,  but that could change to Lintel.
  
 The Rails  community has come up with a few slogans of their own, like 
"convention over  configuration".  What it really means is that development 
under Java and .Net is  too complex, and that the tooling required to support 
that level of complexity  is unnecessary, given simplified programming 
interfaces.  If Rails can offer  that, it's something that will resonate with a 
lot of developers, particularly  in this community.
  
 There are a lot of  RPG programmers who assign field names and attributes in 
display file records  the same as physical file records, so that mapping is 
done automatically between  the two.  That's an example of "convention over  
configuration".
  
 This  discussion motivated me to look into the Rails philosophy, community, 
and  architecture.  It has been interesting.  I've been reading accounts of 
Java and  PHP developers creating Rails versions of their applications, and 
reducing the  lines of code, cutting the code in half in one account, and 
comparing the  versions for performance and scalability.  The reports are 
favoring Ruby and  Rails.
  
 Nathan.


----- Original Message ----
From: Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2006 7:03:28 AM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Ruby On Rails on the iSeries

From: Jerome Hughes

Both replies are completely unreasonable, show no sign of
comprehension of anything stated, no questions answered, no valid
points replacing the earlier trash, no actual ideas or knowledge
expressed. DRY.

Basically just doing your level best to attempt to ruin my night by
casting me as the anti-you, which I most emphatically am not. Please
find someone else to exercise this need against, or keep the need to
yourself.

Jerome, I am not the first person to cast doubts about RoR, nor will I be
the last.  Whether I'm right or wrong in my opinions, your consistent
approach of attacking the messenger rather than the message is not going to
do anything to strengthen your position.

Address my points.  Show me where RoR has been used to write
enterprise-level business logic.  Show me how it interfaces to other
languages, such as RPG.  Then I'll be interested in it for the SMB business
space that the midrange serves.

I could be wrong about the language.  My initial impression of EGL was
pretty ambivalent as well, until I saw that it actually added something to
the mix that I hadn't seen before: a WYSIWYG JSF editor that used
program-defined metadata.  When it added a clean interface to Java (and thus
to RPG), that made me think it could be used for SMB solutions.

Tools like Zope and RoR may be great, but if all they provide is the ability
to build yet another web-based, light database solution, then they're less
relevant to my clients.  Again, I may be wrong, but nothing in my admittedly
limited experience tells me it's any better for those things than Python is.


Anyway, remember that I'm actually one of the milder dissenters you will
have.  I've programmed in Python and I understand the Ruby syntax.  I may
not have programmed Rails, but I've done a lot of research.  You will get
people who push back on it just because it's new, and if this is your idea
of convincing such people, then I daresay you're probably going to fail
pretty miserably.

Okee dokee, enough.  You're the one who started with "(wrote this last
night, but held off sending it... also not looking for a debate, but perhaps
can present another view, my friend...)".  Please show the list more about
the language as you learn more.  I'm most interested in interfacing with
legacy databases and being able to call host programs, but I'm sure there
are others who will be interested in other capabilities.

Joe