Ruby on Rails

[fos]

I have heard a lot about a new web development framework called Ruby on Rails. A new livecd version of PCLinuxOS dedicated to Ruby development will be out shortly. I looked around on the net and found an article on the O'Reily site that looks interesting:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html

Have any of you used Ruby? Is it worth all the hype or is it just another flash in the pan?

fos...

[danieldk]

At the moment it is not much more than a hype. It is relatively new, and as such it will probably have difficulties to match up with all Java frameworks both in maturity and popularity. As far as I can see JBoss, Jonas, Tomcat, and other servlet containers will continue to gain market share for mission critical applications (along with frameworks like Struts).

Edit: I have to add that much of its ease decreases strictness, making it harder to debug applications.

[Mark Woodward]

Hi Daniel, FOS,

At the moment it is not much more than a hype. It is relatively new, and as such it will probably have difficulties to match up with all Java frameworks both in maturity and popularity. As far as I can see JBoss, Jonas, Tomcat, and other servlet containers will continue to gain market share for mission critical applications (along with frameworks like Struts).


Daniel, I usually agree with much of what you say, but can't here ;-)
Ruby is the sweetest language I've ever come across and there are a lot of highly respected programmers (Martin Fowler to name one) who rave about it.

As for Rails I haven't used it but I'll bet my left testicle it's no flash in the pan!! From what I've heard its 'simple, scales well and its easy to incorporate AJAX etc ie Web2.0). If it's anything like Ruby itself (which it is, it's written in it!) it will continue to grow. Maybe not at the rate it is currently but grow it will. Mark my words ;-)

Java/C# for mission critical apps, but for the other 99% keep an eye on Ruby/Rails!!


Edit: I have to add that much of its ease decreases strictness, making it harder to debug applications.

I'd say the complete opposite! "Much of its ease decreases the need to debug". Development in Ruby (and Python for that matter) tends to be small iterations of code/test/code/test...

Streuth, fancy defending a programming language! I agree there's definitely a level of hype involved (particularly around Rails), but where Ruby's concerned I for one think it's justified.

PS Have you seen the July issue of the Linux Journal? ;-)

--
Mark

[fos]

Hi Mark,

Welcome to the forum! I appreciate your comments on Ruby. There must be something to it more than the just its prominent place in the news. I'm going to be starting a class in C++ this coming semester. Back in the early 70s when I started my computer training, objects hadn't made it to the curriculum yet. :) Ruby is next!

fos...

[danieldk]

Welcome!


Ruby is the sweetest language I've ever come across and there are a lot of highly respected programmers (Martin Fowler to name one) who rave about it.


That's just a matter of taste. In my eyes it sacrifices a lot of syntactic clarity that some other popular languages have.

As for Rails I haven't used it but I'll bet my left testicle it's no flash in the pan!! From what I've heard its 'simple, scales well and its easy to incorporate AJAX etc ie Web2.0).

Many other frameworks do. As a framework, it does pretty much the same as Django and other web frameworks.

Maybe not at the rate it is currently but grow it will. Mark my words ;-)

Oh, I can agree that it will grow for a while. Most things do. And at some point it hits a ceiling.

I'd say the complete opposite! "Much of its ease decreases the need to debug". Development in Ruby (and Python for that matter) tends to be small iterations of code/test/code/test...

Yes, and no. While it is true that the higher level a language is, it often avoids bugs, because it simply requires less lines of code. But, a whole lot of bugs are simply hidden because of the weak type system of many interpreted languages (like Ruby and Python). Most new high-level languages treat everything as references, but do no type checking. So, if you introduce type-related bugs, language compilers like Java's usually will

1. Bail out during the type checking of the compilation stage
2. Fail miserably during run-time (e.g. due to erronous casting)

On the other hands, languages with a weak type system will happily store wrong data in arrays, hashmaps, etc. Because there is no way they can know what assignments are correct, and what assignments are not. This is ok for simple applications, or some parts of web applications. But it is something you want to avoid for anything that touches critical data. I (and many others) would rather like to have a program treating critical data fail miserably, than having it do something completely wrong for days without noticing.

Streuth, fancy defending a programming language! I agree there's definitely a level of hype involved (particularly around Rails), but where Ruby's concerned I for one think it's justified.

It's never good to defend *one* language ;). Since most languages will fall into obsoletion within 10 or 15 years. And most paradigms don't apply universally. Just pick the right tool for the job. Some managers are pushing RoR or some other framework because it is hyped. The same thing happened with Enterprise Java Beans (2.0) a few years ago. Now it is generally agreed upon that EJB2s have some areas of application, but are overkill or wrong for other areas.