Re: Tales from the Dark Side

Hello


Ian Joyner wrote:
> 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?
>
Rails doesn't persist sessions like WebObjects or Tapestry.
The sessions are more like java servlet sessions.
So the objects have to be manually retrieved and saved in the session 
area in every method(submit) call.

Ruby is very dynamic. The downside of this is if there is something 
wrong in the code the Ruby instance may decide to just stop
without any warning. eg if there is a syntax error in a database model 
the browser will just return a blank page. There won't be any
error messages in any log files. There are ways though to find database 
errors. Just fire up irb and access/trigger the model outside the web 
application.

With rails I liked being able to make a change in an rb file, save and 
then just refresh the browser.  Its quite fast to develop in from that 
aspect. Maybe this is similar to what objective script in WebObjects 
used to be.

Regards

Peter

> Ian
>
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