Re: Ruby on Rails Review

Hi Pierce,

Thanks for the RoR review. This seems to be consistent with what I am  
hearing from others. Hope you don't mind my comments on some of the  
general architecture points (mostly not RoR related).


>   We probably have the most insanely complicated WO site in the  
> world, developed in WO 4.5.x, which we've been successively  
> patching to work with each new MacOSX release. I'm constantly  
> looking at other web frameworks because my choices at some point  
> are going to be:
>
>    1. Port not just the portion of the site that is WO to Java, but  
> all the other code as well (not a realistic option, we have many  
> custom servers behind the scenes to deliver specific pieces of site  
> functionality).
>    2. Move to an Obj-C WO clone like SOPE.
>    3. Move the Web UI to something else, which can bridge to all  
> the ObjC code.


I have no idea how your current system is architectured, so I may be  
totally off (see below), but I'd say look at web services (that's  
your #3 I guess). I've never advocated casual use of any remoting  
technology (EJB, web services, etc.), but when *complexity* and  
*legacy* are the keywords, web service wrappers can save you from a  
full rewrite. After a recent project at a big former WO shop in NYC  
(mainframes and other "cool" stuff, you know), I started to really  
appreciate that.

On the other hand, nothing is ever simple. Most of my own WO apps are  
fairly "flat" - all potential "service logic" is evenly split between  
WO components and enterprise objects. Migrating such flat design to  
services is probably as bad as a full rewrite.


> There is one thing that AR does better then EOF: You can easily map  
> a class to a column or set of columns. So if you have a value that  
> can only be 1-5, you can write a class that both is stored as 1-3,  
> and returns the name: High,Medium,Low.

Cayenne supports Java 1.5 enums as attribute types. Probably possible  
to do that with EOF/Java as well.



> The various template systems:
>
>    I don't really like template systems that embed code. It's true  
> as the book says that ruby makes most of that code trivial, and I'm  
> not sure it's better to have:
>
> <WEBOBJECT name=string></WEBOBJECT>
>
> string: WOString { value = [email protected]; }
>
>  in two files vs.
>
> <%= list[1].name %>
>
>  in one file.
>
> But the real key with template systems is "How well do they play  
> with Dreamweaver?" I feel that a key advantage of WO is that the  
> HTML is separate enough that the artists can go off and design  
> things without mucking up the code.  I don't know what the answer  
> is for Ruby, but I'm not particularly happy with WO's template  
> system either.

 From my experience none of the templating systems out there play  
well with Dreamweaver... Or rather there is a human factor - graphic  
artists tend to mess your dynamic artifacts no matter what.

So here is one more Java-based web technology that is totally worth  
checking as a WO frontend replacement:

http://click.sourceforge.net/

Click uses Velocity templates that are as good or as bad as anything  
else (certainly less verbose than many alternatives). Click has clean  
static-like URLs. It doesn't provide any special session state  
management beyond what a servlet spec does, leaving it up to the  
user. But this is much better than broken or half-baked  
implemehtation in some other WO-like open source frameworks that I've  
used.

Andrus Adamchik