Re: overriding on Rails: tables, foreign keys

From: Jerome Hughes

The scaffold is a basic one table editor, and most real views require
data from more than one table. This is handled in the model with
relationships, and then controllers use the relationships to load
variables that are passed out to the views for rendering. Just
methods on objects, no SQL written, all of it generated based on the
model. Believe there are better paging alternatives available or on
the way, need to get more info on that.

I understand.  EGL does the same thing, except that you explicitly define
the fields in the record, which is nice when you are only accessing a few
fields from the file. 

Ruby is a "meta-language" which allows the creation of
domain specific sub-languages for handling these sorts of issues, the
sub-language code is still in Ruby syntax, but with established
conventions for handling the problem domain.

See, this is where I get off the bandwagon.  While I'm sure there are a lot
of valid academic reasons to use phrases like "domain-specific language",
Ruby isn't doing anything we don't do when we write Java classes or even ILE
subroutines.  I can (and often do) define "conventions" when writing
applications: type 3 objects don't get inventory allocated, warehouse one is
used for dropships, and so on.  In fact when the name of something magically
determines what it does, I tend to call that "hardcoding", not convention.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of magic, either in applications or in
languages.  I prefer my rules spelled out where I can see them.

But that won't stop me from taking a look at RoR to see where it does well.
Ror seems to have a bit more traction than Python, so we'll see if it
continues.

Joe