Re: More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

During the past few weeks I've been dropping by Barnes and Noble in the

evening, 
I have gone to B&N since this post began also and each time it has either
been AJAX or RoR books :-)  Too funny...

Ruby's philosophy of "convention over configuration" makes sense to me. 

I think that simplicity is great.  The part I would have a problem with is
when I had to work around it - say I didn't create the database and instead
it was created by an RPG programmer w/o any DB imposed relationships built
in.  

I am hoping you pick up RoR and do a project with it because I would love to
hear your opinion after that so I could save myself from the pain :-)  

Aaron Bartell

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 11:47 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: [WEB400] More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

During the past
few weeks I've been dropping by Barnes and Noble in the evening, reading
books on Ruby & Rails.  It's becoming even more clear why a lot of
developers are getting hooked on it.  Interpreted runtime environments are
seductive to begin with.  Type in and run a statement or two and you're
immediately rewarded with a response.  Try something new and you immediately
know whether it works, or not.  
No intermediate code validation, compilation, binding, or deployment steps,
required.

 

Rails provides
single command line utilities for setting up projects and generating CRUD
applications.  Contrast that with Wizard and WYSIWYG IDEs that require
dozens of point and click operations and property settings to accomplish the
same thing.

 

Free, open-source
languages, runtime environments, and tools are maturing and seem to be
gaining momentum.  MIT's One Laptop Per Child program may lead to the
production and distribution of millions of $100 linux-based laptops around
the world.  I get the impression that kids could use a device like that for
Rails development.  
Contrast that with the horsepower required to run a complex IDE like WDSC.

 

Ruby's philosophy
of "convention over configuration" makes sense to me.  Name your application
components after your database tables and eliminate a lot of steps and a lot
of code related to object-relational mapping.  Contrast that with a
framework like Hibernate, where you basically duplicate database meta data
across runtime environments using a multiplicity of configuration files.

 

Separating code
into Model-View-Controller components is not an option, in Rails.  It's the
foundation, leading to good separation of code for maintenance.

 

Ruby's use of
inheritance is also seductive.  Building new application components is a
matter of extending pre-existing framework components, leading to minimal
code requirements.

 

People are
reporting performance and scalability comparable to Java and J2EE
frameworks.

 

Nathan.