Re: Ruby on Rails?

Hi Mont,

> My main concern with regards to RoR pertains to the EOF side of things.
>
> Some of the EOF features I depend on are:
>
> - Peer editing contexts. I use an EC for each page so that if the user
> abandons changes they are not accidentally saved when they do 
> something on
> another page. This also is necessary for fully integarating unsaved 
> objects
> into the object graph.

Rails does not have anything that comes close to EOF's editing context. 
As a consequence, you'll miss many features and conveniences of EOF, 
like peer editing contexts, in Rails. ActiveRecord is rather 
lightweight, but has other nice features and a small memory footprint, 
on the other hand.

After all, EOEditingContext is a (rather sophisticated) implementation 
of the Unit Of Work pattern. 
(http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/unitOfWork.html) If you need a 
transaction to span multiple pages/requests, you can use a 
implementation of this pattern, that suits your needs.

> - Automatic many-to-many join table management

You can even put additional attributes (e.g. for sort ordering) in a 
join table.

> - Snapshoting, I am not a fan of state-less applications

Not sure what you mean by snapshoting in conjunction with application 
state. ActiveRecord does not keep row-level snapshots in memory like 
EOF. If you need to retain objects in memory across requests, you would 
store them in the session.

> - EOQualifier, I use this heavily for our report builder

You can't compare EOF and ActiveRecord one-to-one. There are many ways 
to qualify queries in AR, but nothing that resembles EOQualifier.

> - Temporary global IDs for for fully integrating unsaved objects into 
> the
> object graph. You need something in place of the PK.

You don't need PKs to build an object graph in memory. An ActiveRecord 
has an ID if it was saved to the database, otherwise not. Your object 
graph doesn't care.

> - Faults, for efficiency in both the application and development.

Check.

> Can anyone that has used RoR/Active Record tell me if any/all of these
> specific pieces of EOF exist in RoR?

Don't go looking for EOF in ActiveRecord feature-wise. It's a different 
approach to the same problem. If you build an application with Rails 
and ActiveRecord, you'll do it differently from the beginning. Don't 
think EOF, think ActiveRecord. I know this is hard if you're accustomed 
to EOF, but Rails gives you other joys that compensate for this lack of 
features.

HTH
Andreas