Re: Tales from the Dark Side

I don't know this for a fact, but I recall reading somewhere that there will
soon be a ruby2c compiler that will product compiled C code on the
installation platform. Pedal to the metal...

On 17/03/06, Peter McGregor <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Ian Joyner wrote:
> > 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)?
> Currently Ruby doesn't compile but the the creator of Ruby, and others,
> are converting Ruby into a byte code vm, like Java.
> Its called Ruby done rite.
> There is someone doing an Eclipse plugin for ruby who is incorporating
> some sort of syntax checking. From memory I think he
> is using a port of Ruby that runs on the Java VM, to help with building
> some sort of syntax tree.
>
>
> > I'd guess there's no type checking so that significant source of
> > errors could get through.
> When an error does occur there is no stack trace, as with java, so
> sometimes its hard to know what is going on.
>
> Rails is just one of many web frameworks built on Ruby. IOWA is another
> web application framework that uses continuations,
> which means that class variables are persisted during the
> request/response loop. CGIKIT is also built on Ruby and is very similar
> to the WebObjects presentation layer.
>
> I think the Rails presentation layer could be improved. eg there is no
> way to have multiple submit buttons in a form with the Rails
> API. Special text strings have to be added to the id= or name= fields in
> the html tags to pass this information to a central method.
> This method then has to decode the input parameters to decide what
> actual method to call.
> I figured out how to do this because I did a google search and saw a
> reply to a question that had been asked by another former webobjects
> person. The question was about multiple submit buttons.
> > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WebObjects-dev mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/webobjects-dev
>
> _______________________________________________
> WebObjects-dev mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/webobjects-dev
>

_______________________________________________
WebObjects-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/webobjects-dev