Re: More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

[Jerome Hughes <jromeh@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the report on your research, Nathan. What books have you  
been looking at?

On 9/19 was one of three board member presenters who shared the OMNI  
Dinner Meeting presentation time, went last and presented an overview  
of Ruby on Rails, followed by a demonstration of building a simple  
application with CRUD capabilities provided by first a dynamic and  
then a generated scaffold. Was intending to add another linked table  
in the demo, but got a little off track and didn't really have time  
to do so.

To finish up, showed my current version of the tutorial application  
from "Agile Web Development with Rails" which includes AJAX  
replacements of page elements (coded with a couple lines of Ruby that  
generate the Javascript and XML needed to make it happen) and  
Javascript effects from the Scriptaculous library add-ins like "blind  
down" (gradually showing a page element like in a powerpoint  
presentation) and "highlight element" (a color brighten and fade)  
that were also implemented in just a couple of lines of Ruby code  
that makes use of others' work to generate on the client the  
Javascript defined on the server.

Also, while presenting this on my Mac, the "ringer" in the audience  
with some Rails knowledge pointed to a peecee environment known as  
"Instant Rails" that along with tutorials like Curt Hibbing's  
"Rolling with Ruby on Rails" at onlamp.com could very easily move  
someone who's learned a bit from reading about this stuff to doing  
it. It's...

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/

> ...a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails,  
> Apache, and MySQL, all pre-configured and ready to run. No  
> installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and  
> run it. It does not modify your system environment.

No less impressed with RoR, still moving forward with it for a couple  
of my own uses. The chirb (chicago ruby users group) is meeting 10/9  
on the JRuby technology, which allows running Ruby in the JVM. Sun  
has hired the two main JRuby maintainers to work on the project full  
time. Hope to attend, but may have some OMNI duties related to OMNI's  
Day of Education on 10/10 preclude it.

http://omniuser.org/DOE2006.html

--Jerome Hughes
2006 OMNI Seminar VP
http://omniuser.org/DOE2006.html


On Sep 29, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
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