Re: Tales from the Dark Side

On 17/03/2006, at 4:47 PM, Peter McGregor wrote:

> 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.

So Ruby is a scripting language. Does it compile at all (at least as  
far as being able to precheck all code branches for errors, not  
necessarily code generation, a bit like WFL)? I'd guess there's no  
type checking so that significant source of errors could get through.  
Don't think I like the prefixing variables with @ and : to denote  
what kind of variable they are, but then scripting languages tend not  
to have declarations where you would put such modifiers only once.
>
> 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.

Did seem pretty neat how you didn't have to build, but then there is  
the downside as you say.
>
> Regards
>
> Peter
>
>> Ian