Re: Ruby on Rails?

On 28. Okt 2005, at 23:03 Uhr, Andreas Korth wrote:
> But the overall concept is the same as in WOF and other frameworks.
>
> RoR does not have stateful components like WO.

Or in other words: the overall concept is NOT the same as in WOF. RoR  
has no nested component processing at all.

Other wisdom spread like "What does D2W assume? CRUD!" doesn't help  
your argumentation either ... "Rails developers don't repeat  
themselves" - where do you repeat yourself in WO?


I don't intend to get deep into the discussion, but yes, WO allows  
you to do a LOT of stuff using configuration. Why is configuration a  
good thing? Because configuration can be processed (/read) by tools.  
Whether those are D2W rules, WO component bindings or EOModel mappings.
And I'm not talking about configuration which is then used to  
generate code stubs and such which is widely done in the Java world,  
which in turn is why it has a "bad touch". I'm talking about  
configuration which is directly processed by the frameworks.


For trivial applications D2W is certainly not harder, but easier to  
develop with because of the tool assistance.
Eg the popular RoR DB example involves a MySQL Cocoa frontend to show  
how columns etc are added to the application. For the developer this  
is no different than adding columns in EOModeler (or Xcode) and then  
push the changes to the database. In contrary, with the latter he  
gets plenty of additional modeling feature w/o resorting to code and  
probably most important: database independence and redeployment.


Now why is RoR popular? I think those things play into that:
a) hype. hype. and again: hype.
b) Prototype/Scriptaculous
c) nice web design / good documentation
d) scripted language

Well, WO has no a). b) and c) are no technical features of RoR, RoR  
merely uses them, just like other frameworks.
And of course d) is a major rapid turn around winner. Though we also  
had this with WO 4.5 and for Java WO it doesn't really matter in  
combination with Eclipse (everything compiled on-save).


IMHO RoR is a nice framework and well suited for doing simple CRUD  
apps quickly. It just doesn't provide anything new and hardly what is  
already available in other frameworks. This doesn't make it worse but  
it doesn't make it better either :-)
What I'm more disappointed about is that it doesn't seem to provide  
an advantage over Zope which is much more mature and is as good or  
better for simple apps.
Eg I find RoR URL mapping _extremely_ disappointing compared to  
ZPublisher.
That is wins here is pure hype / Im-bored-lets-try-something-new IMHO.


Also I'm really tired of the anti-XML attitude in RoR. Personally I  
do not care whether I describe a database table as
   CREATE TABLE user (
     login    VARCHAR(123) PRIMARY KEY,
     lastname VARCHAR(456)
   )
or
   <table name="user">
     <column name="login"    type="varchar" size="123" is-primary="1" />
     <column name="lastname" type="varchar" size="123" />
   </table>
or
   <user>
     <login    size="123" is-primary="1" />
     <lastname size="234" />
   </user>
Writing those is equally fast in vi only that XML can also be  
processed by tools and provides plenty of additional opportunities ...

Greets,
   Helge