More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

During the past 
few weeks I've been dropping by Barnes and Noble in the evening, reading books 
on Ruby & Rails.  It's becoming even more clear why a lot of developers are 
getting hooked on it.  Interpreted runtime environments are seductive to begin 
with.  Type in and run a statement or two and you're immediately rewarded with 
a 
response.  Try something new and you immediately know whether it works, or not. 
 
No intermediate code validation, compilation, binding, or deployment steps, 
required.

 

Rails provides 
single command line utilities for setting up projects and generating CRUD 
applications.  Contrast that with Wizard and WYSIWYG IDEs that require dozens 
of 
point and click operations and property settings to accomplish the same 
thing.

 

Free, open-source 
languages, runtime environments, and tools are maturing and seem to be gaining 
momentum.  MIT's One Laptop Per Child program may lead to the production and 
distribution of millions of $100 linux-based laptops around the world.  I get 
the impression that kids could use a device like that for Rails development.  
Contrast that with the horsepower required to run a complex IDE like 
WDSC.

 

Ruby's philosophy 
of "convention over configuration" makes sense to me.  Name your application 
components after your database tables and eliminate a lot of steps and a lot of 
code related to object-relational mapping.  Contrast that with a framework like 
Hibernate, where you basically duplicate database meta data across runtime 
environments using a multiplicity of configuration files.

 

Separating code 
into Model-View-Controller components is not an option, in Rails.  It's the 
foundation, leading to good separation of code for 
maintenance.

 

Ruby's use of 
inheritance is also seductive.  Building new application components is a 
matter of extending pre-existing framework components, leading to minimal code 
requirements.

 

People are 
reporting performance and scalability comparable to Java and J2EE 
frameworks.

 

Nathan.