Re: Ruby on Rails Review

> > 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


Would that be Tapestry then? :-)

Same experience here. Tapestry makes me type too much. Click is considerably
easier to develop in, and considerably simpler to understand. It seems
faster too. And although the Tapestry fans in my office go on and on about
how they can do wonderful things in Tapestry, I haven't seen anything that I
couldn't do in Click. I have 3 applications going out written using Click
(unfortunately not publicly accessible) in a couple of weeks, and it is
holding up very well.

Another link here - the Click examples: http://www.sunvolt.com/examples/

As you can see from the source, pretty simple stuff. And developing your own
components is easy too. For example, I have developed a component to collect
latitude and longitude coordinates, and another (AutoForm) that reads the
methods and attributes from a supplied database (Hibernate - Cayenne was a
leap too far for Da Management) POJO and renders a form containing those
attributes (well, I have a properties file  that I consult to filter
out/order stuff). Reused all over my code. Point is, Click is a
component-based web application framework. And the templates are written in
Velocity. Mine mostly contain '$form' or '$table' and nothing else. The
Click components render XHTML as well.

I've been playing with RoR for a few months, right through 0.8 to now. It
ticks my box on the 'less typing is good' category, and it's really easy to
get going quickly, especially once you have learned Ruby (my recommended
first step). Very nice database integration, lightweight sessions,
bookmarkable URLs, AJAX integration nicely done. I am warming to it more and
more.

Still keep coming home to WO though. Like a pair of comfy old shoes...

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