Re: Ruby on Rails?

On 28. Oct 2005, at 15:05 Uhr, Paul Lynch wrote:

> When the patching and installers work for everyone, that will be a big 
> improvement.  The first link is for Ruby only, not Rails - Ruby isn't 
> a problem.

Installing Rails if you already have Ruby and RubyGems is a matter of 
typing "gem install rails" in a shell. Alternatively, you may also want 
to check out locomotive:

http://locomotive.sourceforge.net/

>> I don't actually see the NeXT/Cocoa background of Ruby.
>
> Then it's about time that you became aware of it.

Could you get specific on this? I still don't see any connection 
between NeXT/Cocoa and Ruby. Ruby was _not_ inspired by any technology 
from NeXT or Apple but from Perl, Python and Smalltalk.

>> If there's controller or model related code in the template, it's the 
>> developer who is evil. Not the framework.
>>
> No, it's the framework.  Some things are appropriate to embed, as you 
> say.  But having a system that allows you to embed random code in 
> views is not good.  The same argument you use is the one that is 
> always given by advocates of flawed templating systems (like asp/jsp).

In WO you could write business logic in a component class (controller), 
which is also evil, isn't it? Would you say that WO is flawed because 
it allows developers to write arbitrary Java code in component classes? 
The question is whether the developer understands the MVC pattern or 
not. There's nothing wrong with putting code in templates as long as 
you know what you're doing.

>> Rails does not assume a CRUD app, it doesn't generate any code if not 
>> explicitly asked to and you don't have to ignore any generated code 
>> for that matter.
>
> The scaffold templates assume CRUD.  That's what they are there for.  
> I pointed out (in the part of my quote that I trimmed) that Rails is 
> capable of more than just this.  The scaffold code is good and easy to 
> adapt - as such it is kind of a halfway house to the complexity of D2.

Scaffold != Rails. What does D2W assume? CRUD! There's an inspect page, 
an edit page and a list page to begin with. No one said that Rails' 
scaffolding is as powerful as D2W.

> If your only approach to supporting your pet environment is to insult 
> people you don't agree with, then I doubt that many people will agree 
> with you.  Having GUI apps (WOBuilder and EOModeller) to handle the 
> otherwise annoying configuration files is better than not having any.

Maybe I was a little sarcastic. My apologies if you felt insulted, this 
was never my intent. However, I still think you're talking about things 
you know little about. The term pet environment shows an alarming 
degree of elitism that goes with many WO developers. Rails does not 
come close to EOF or D2W in terms of complexity - because it was never 
meant to!

Many real world applications do not require EOF's level of 
sophistication. Rails was written to get things done. And it is 
extremely good at this. It's a high productivity environment for 
building web applications in a clean an elegant manner. In many 
respects it lets WO look very aged.

Talking about config files: Rails hardly needs any (and consequently no 
special applications to edit them). With WO, I need a full blown IDE 
along with a set of specialised tools. I write my Rails apps with a 
plain text editor. There's clearly a focus on keeping things reasonably 
simple and that's where Rails beats WO big time.

Cheers,
Andreas