Re: Tales from the Dark Side

Strange how Apple posted a note about Ruby on Rails in their latest  
ADN (http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html). So, I had a  
look. Seems to be very text and terminal based from the tutorial with  
no tools like WO Builder, so you end up hand crafting the html with < 
% ... %> rails tags instead of WebObject tags automatically provided  
by WOB.

Installation was somewhat tedious as well taking about an hour (but  
straightforward). Ruby is reasonably simple, considering it has  
syntactic elements of LISP, perl, Java, and Eiffel. Treating line  
breaks as statement terminators is a throw back to the 1950s – that's  
why ALGOL introduced the semi-colon (which Ada and Eiffel realised  
was unnecessary anyway if the syntax were regular enough, and also  
that begins were unnecessary, you only need ends, like Ruby, but it  
mixes in { and } just to keep C people happy I guess). Then again C  
defines don't get this right either also requiring line continuations  
(whoever stole the idea of defines from Burroughs ALGOL missed the  
subtle point that the # terminates the define, not starts it!)

The MVC separation was nice, but you get that in WO components  
anyway. I didn't see that you could do desktop apps in rails like WO.  
Is there an equivalent of EOModeler so you can get your model right  
first?

Still, not bad as a simple object-relational system for simple web  
pages. Don't know how it would scale up though. They said migrations  
were database agnostic, but that is the point of SQL anyway (to be a  
standard). Perhaps just nicer to work with than SQL, but still text  
based rather than entity based as in EOModeler.

Anyone else have real experience with it?

Ian