Re: Ruby on Rails?

I would consider myself a RoR booster and I agree with this.

There are some types of problems that RoR is NOT good at solving (and  
WO might be very good at solving). The fact is that RoR IS good for  
lots of types of problems and it seems that types of problems it is  
good for are fairly common.

I would argue that for MANY projects, WO (and of course J2EE) are  
overkill as far as features. With the features come complexity and a  
high learning curve. Like I said earlier, I spent about 3 years doing  
90% of my stuff in WO and I really like the tech - it's great stuff.  
I also really like Rails.

A ton of really respected software guys like Dave Thomas and Bruce  
Perens are saying really nice things about Rails. Smoke = fire.

It's a great tool to have in your set of options but that's all that  
it is. It's not the second coming or a winning lottery  ticket.

One undisputed edge is the whole licensing/Open Source/toolkit  
issues. WO is a bit of a mess in this department - no one knows when/ 
if Apple would ever pull the plug or make if MacOS X Server only. I  
can't sell a OS X Server setup to my customers so that would probably  
move us off of WO for good if that were to ever happen.

The other place RoR is way out ahead is AJAX stuff. If you decide  
part of your application could be enhanced with an AJAX feature, RoR  
makes it dead easy to add in.

To me, each product reflects its origins pretty closely. WebObjects  
was designed to be an enterprise level solution that could handle  
pretty much any strange setup/legacy/database situation that could be  
in play in some random Fortune 500.

Rails was born in the 'Web 2.0' environment, from small teams  
building very useful but relatively simple products. For a small team  
of entrepreneurs building a killer Web app or service, especially  
from scratch, it is tops.

Cheers.

On Oct 28, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Andreas Korth wrote:

> 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