Re: Ruby on Rails?

On 28. Oct 2005, at 03:18 Uhr, Hunter Hillegas wrote:

> I've switched pretty much all of our development of Web apps to RoR.

It turned out that even large scale applications are handled well by 
RoR. Although RoR is far less complex than WO, it doesn't fall short in 
terms of productivity and maintainability.  It has definitely the 
potential to replace WO in many - if not the majority - of application 
domains. In many ways RoR feels much better than WO: Integrated and 
powerful testing facilities, readable URLs, (really) rapid turnaround, 
an app console, an extensible templating system and a lightweight yet 
powerful persistence framework.

> It has nothing that compares to D2W, so if you're using that, don't 
> even bother looking.

It's got scaffolding. It can be used get a prototype in even less time 
than D2W. It doesn't have a rule engine and truly dynamic page 
generation. The scaffolding script builds create, inspect, edit and 
delete pages for a model (=entity). If new fields are added to the 
model's table in the database, these pages automatically reflect these 
changes. Yes in fact: you only need to add the fields in the database 
to extend the model. No config or code files need to be modified! Rails 
developers don't repeat themselves ;-)

Scaffolding is similar to but not quite as powerful as D2W. But saying 
that there is nothing like D2W is sort of an understatement.

> If you're using EOF and WOF to build Web-apps, it is worth a look for 
> sure. My team is very productive with RoR. It feels less 'heavy' than 
> WO in terms of all the things I have to get going to get an app 
> running.

I second that. If you like WebObjects you should _definitely_ take a 
look at RoR. There is a noticeable productivity boost. And if you ever 
wanted to build AJAX enhanced apps, don't look for any other framework.

> One nice thing - being Open Source - I know where the product is 
> going, a stark contrast to WO. Also, being free of EOModeler and 
> WOBuilder is not making me sad.

Yes!

Cheers,
Andreas