Re: Rails Development Environment -- WEB400

Well, I don't do much .jsp OR PHP development (none lately). My original Web stuff was Java servlets using Freemarker templates which was a very easy transition from the RPG 5250 model I was (and am) used to. That has generally morphed into using jQuery and JSON with my Java servlets (and occasionally RPG) delivering the json to the client. It is just so drop dead easy to develop using jQuery and associated plug-ins that I have pretty much abandoned my template based methods.

Ruby and Rails has it's own challenges. My first foray into Rails was in search of the holy grail of CRUD apps - A couple of steps and, voila! a file maintenance app (yeah....right!) Active Scaffold helped a lot but Rails 3 has changed the paradigm a bit and I have been struggling with new learning curve primarily because some of the "pieces" in Rails have been unbundled in Rails 3 so you have greater control but need to manually do more things. I will be presenting again at Common and hope to have a useful demo app for both web and mobile using Rails on i. DB access is the biggest wildcard. If you want "native" I/O you need to use the DB2 Connector ($$) with the rails DB2 gem and it still isn't really "native". You could use MySQL on i as an alternative. I switched to using JRuby because I can use the JDBC adapter in the JT400 toolkit. It is 100% compatible with Ruby and 100% compatible with Java so you can include Java elements in your app if you want. The Radiant CMS at http://www.roroni.com is a Rails app running on jRuby on i (using the Glassfish gem as the app server). It is connected to the DB2 for i database using JDBC. The DB is native and was created with the standard Rake migrate command common to all Rails apps.

Ruby on Rails is simple to use and install. I love the gem command and there are hundreds of tools and plug ins that can deliver out of the box functionality for your web apps (it is much like PHP in this respect). Language syntax is VERY different and takes some mind bending turns for us procedural folks (even when we have quite a bit of OO experience). If you are an experienced i developer and comfortable with PHP, I don't think RoR brings all that much to the table (that is spoken by a relatively inexperienced PHP guy...).

My bread and butter apps are java servlet backends with jQuery and JSON but that is only because I have an application suite that runs on both i (using DB2 for i) and Windows (using MS SQL server). When my first Linux customer appears, I'll be ready for that as well. I plan to use Rails for updates to my company web sites and will probably use Refinery or Radiant as my CMS to manage the sites. Hope to have it all ready by Common.

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com

On 1/31/2011 11:02 AM, Richard Schoen wrote:

Thanks Pete,

Just curious. In your opinion how does Rails stack up against JSP or PHP for web dev ?

Regards,
Richard Schoen
RJS Software Systems Inc.
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message: 3
date: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:15:36 -0700
from: Pete Helgren<pete@xxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: [WEB400] Rails Development Environment

Richard,

Aptana Radrails 2 is what I use.

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com