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You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot.
Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here.
But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:

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Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout

In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch.
In a nutshell: EJB, Hibernate and various other Java flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed.
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You owe it to yourself to go check out some of the screencasts. The two features that have saved me the most time (so far) are:

1. There's just about no configuration to do if you follow some simple and logical naming conventions.
2. Once you've created your database table, a simple "ruby scripts/generate scaffold Model Controller" (substituting your actual model and controller) writes enough code so that you can do inserts, updates and deletes on the table.

From there, you start customizing.

Not trying to insult or anything, but did you RTA? I believe the TFA points to the ruby on rails website which has plenty of resources. One of the links across the top labeled "screencasts" even has videos you can watch.

If you are considering going into any PHP development at all, this is really required reading.

Then I discovered http://www.rubyonrails.org/ and life is now good!

You site is still a jumbled mess.

how exactly did RoR help with the "jumbled mess" and lack of "separation of logic from the presentation" from osCommerce? did it automagically refactor the code for you? or are you living under the impression that all PHP is written like that?

But I last used osCommerce back in it's 2.2 days (t o build http://www.gamefest.com/ ). Doing modifications to the PHP / mysql code was absolutely painful. Horribly painful. There was hardly any separation of logic from the presentation. It was all a jumbled mess.

Then I discovered http://www.rubyonrails.org/ and life is now good!

I've used Mantis for years and it is wonderful - pretty easy to use, flexible, powerful, easy to install, just lovely. There are two things to bear in mind, though, out of the box it doesn't support time keeping of any sort (besides adding a custom field), and also its UI is a bit tricky to configure, it isn't templated so you have to jump into editing its core files. Its PHP & MySQL-based, though they've recently added a database abstraction layer so you can try hooking it up to MSSQL, PostgreSQL, etc.

Another one to consider is the hosted system Backpack, from 37 Signals, the folks you brought Ruby on Rails to the world. They've got a pretty powerful system there, available as a free account or paid if you need extra space, etc.

Damien

The authors of rails books need to stop writing tutorials and write some comprehensive documentation. Even the page is quite lacking.

For example, suppose you have a time field, not a date field, no year, just time. And you want to create that element in your webform.

If it were date, you'd use date_select, pass it the name of the object and the name of the field, and your done, you get a nice input box. Suppose you want the same thing for time, its still date select with a series of discard attributes, e.g.

date_select('meeting','starttime', :discard_year => true)

However, you as the person looking for the documentation for this are led on somewhat of a goose chase becuase your time input box information is not even close to what you'd expect (time_select perhaps?) and you should be looking under "date" for "time".

(Incidentally, Rails 1.0 has a bug where it seems to ignore :discard_year so the whole exercise is quite fustrating when you do find the docs, but i can live with bugs that will be fixed)

1. A apache 1.x or 2.x compatible .so/.dll module.
2. A ISAPI module for IIS.
3. A CGI application.

"Can you name any website or application currently in production that does."

The Rails Wiki has a list.

Here's a great write-up on "conceptual approaches to structuring developer's material for re-use and efficiency of development": http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/TheBigPict ure/

In places this is specific to Ruby on Rails, but key ideas should remain very useful.

Hmmm I wonder why i don't think Java when Im thinking Ajax applications.

HAVE YOU SEEN Suns own tutorials for whats involved in writing simple ajax applications in Java??
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2 EE/AJAX/

Compare that with a something from Ruby, that does a lot more with a lot less code, configurations and time:
http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/flickr-rails-aj ax.mov

Now I wonder why small Web 2.0 companies aren't flocking to Java to power their Web 2.0 apps.

I like using Ruby for this kind of work too. The language is *so* much nicer and easier to work with than Tcl, VB, C#, etc...

I tend to use wxRuby (a subset of wxWidgets / wxWindows) for the GUI toolkit. It works nicely and looks good. However, since it does auto-layout using spacers and such, it might take some time to get used its new paradigm. But once you learn it, it rocks. No more specifying exactly where things go; the toolkit ensures everything lines up right and spaces out right. There are some GUI design tools for it...umm, maybe wxGlade I think?

The downside to this is that (as of summer '05) the tools to wrap up Ruby programs into an .exe package were not totally flawless. I always seemed to have to manually edit the packaging configuration file to ensure that it included all the correct files. But that only took a few seconds. Maybe those programs have been fixed since then (hopefully). RubyForge is a good place to check for them.

I use Eclipse on Windows with the Ruby plugin (RDT). It's great. But you can use any old text editor if you prefer, especially for a small project.

The upside is that you'll be learning Ruby, which is not only a great language, but is also on the upswing! And those skills will be applicable to Web app development too (using Rails). Might be a great skill for you to pick up. Might as well learn a language of the future instead of one of the previous century.

It is no longer limited to subversion actually - there are already plugins for mercurial, perforce and more (see http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/VersioningS ystemBackend).

Some other open-source projects that use Trac include adium, catalyst, ruby on rails and madwifi - see http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/TracUsers for more.

Probably a pretty good sign I should get off my ass and spend some time learning the language if I don't want to become obsolete to my employer.

I suspect your manager (if s/he is a typical manager) hasn't even heard of Perl 6.

Perl 6 is still vapor at this point. It's probably still a year or two away (and may be perpetually, unfortuneately). Yes, there are cool ideas there and you might want to be familiar with some of the highlevel concepts. But if you really want to study some new languages that will help your employment prospects you'd probably be better off learning Ruby at this point (that Rails stuff is really taking off). If you want to learn something on the leading edge you might even want to consider learning Io No books for Io as yet, but it seems to be be generating buzz among the early adopters (the sort of folks who were using Ruby five years ago).

Why not check out Ruby On Rails?

Websites
RubyOnRails - http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Ruby general
http://www.ruby-lang.org/

Programming Ruby book - 1st edition online.
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Ruby Code and Style Online Mag
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/index.html

Small article on how to program in ruby.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/librar y/l-ruby1.html

RubyOnRails vs Java for web development efforts
http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=92#comments

Another comparing Java and Ruby for Web Efforts
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rail s/24863

I'd say so, too.

(Tons of people out there doing PHP, etc, but I would stay on the Java side of the fence)

Dude, are you trying to crush his spirit? PHP has a poor community and lots of sloppy code. But Java's not great, either - it has a lot of massively overengineered frameworks that require a lot of "XML push-ups". It's not a bad language, but I haven't seen a combination of it and any web framework that I enjoy using.

I'd recommend Python (a refreshingly clean language) with Django or Ruby-on-Rails. Both very trendy, but more importantly, fun to code in.

I'd also steer away from Eclipse unless you're using Java. As the parent said, there is some support for other languages, but they haven't gotten the same attention, and more dynamic languages are harder to do tricky IDE things with anyway. Eclipse makes a mediocre text editor; they don't even have a hotkey for joining two adjacent lines together. ('J' in vim.) What makes it great is what it can do with its understanding of your code. For example, hitting F3 (show definition) while the cursor's on "foo.toString()" will examine the type of "foo" to decide which of the many "toString()" definitions to open up. That's impossible to do generally in Python due to its duck typing.

Ruby on rails would be a good framework to do rapid site development. Built in AJAX capabilities and MVC pattern.

if you're referring to a lack of odd people in the ruby community you'll be horrified to know there's many.

thanks for your post, all valid opinion .. i just suspect you're one of these highly intelligent programmers that trip over some minor features you find annoying and then blow your frustrations out of perspective.

(anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores)

granted some of the method names are overly verbose! i've thought that often when looking through the APIs and docs. but that criticism needs to be tempered by pointing out the verbose methods are used very infrequently. 99% of the methods i use are small and concise, like: truncate(), h(), link_to(), redirect() etc.

The biggest annoyance was automated code generation

see this i'm finding hard to understand. when i want to start a new model and controller, i type a line in a prompt, and it makes the few files i need to begin. 'begin' being the operative word. there endeth the code generation.

my method of automated code generation is copy and paste.

If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database

i've NEVER experienced this. never never never. and i have no idea what you're talking about. one of the real clinchers of rails for me is its use of ActionRecord to interface with the database. i modify my database constantly without breaking any code. the only case i can think of when what you describe could happen is if i were to rename a column in the database, then my row.name object wouldn't match. but i would consider a broken website due to this the fault of a stupid developer.

to be able to connect to my database, retrieve a record and update it, in 1 line in some cases, becomes rather neccessary for a developer once they've tried it.

Mydb.update(id, :name => 'John')

But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails

and here is where i'm convinced that you are what i think you are (an intelligent programmer who's taken big issue over minor irritations). large scale use of rails is very easy to find if you visit the rails site . It's also very easy to find a larger list, and a list of interesting apps to boot. granted, not moving pictures, but .. oh go away.

I'm curious to know whether there is a commercial equivalent to Ruby on Rails.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RealWorldU sage I regularly partake in some Penny Arcade at penny-arcade.com . If you don't know about it, check it out.

There is a list of users at:

http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications

It's a new kind of digital "red" cocaine, made by processing coca leaves with iron phosphate and coating the result with a light silicone mist on which nano-transistors can be printed. The resulting product produces, when smoked or inhaled -- hence the "rails" component of the name -- a new style of e-high, where you're able to either interface hallucinogenic side effects with your iTunes graphical output, or you can join any IP-based E-HI network and select topics for your stoned brain to mull over. Watch out for the latter because, dude, the term "flame" takes on a *whole* new meaning.

Anyway, go to http://www.rubyonrails.org/ and see if you want to take part. It's amazing, and you'll definitely want to get in on it before the Bush administration starts taxing it or something ...

This is a 15 min presentation someone did setting up a weblog using it. I think this example better explains it than most descriptions I've read.

Excuse me for sounding dumb, but what is Ruby on Rails? I've heard a lot about it recently, but haven't the slightest clue what it is. A little bit of background would be most appreciated.

A web application framework, like Ruby on Rails, can isolate you from most of the JS. Here is a introduction to Rails and Ajax.

I've just done a site in Ruby on Rails, which includes nice javascript libraries for AJAX stuff (I think it's from here), and you can use the AJAX stuff without using Rails.

So if you want a platform independent AJAX app, you pretty much need a bit of code which does things the Microsoft way when the standard ways don't work.

No, you just need RubyOnRails and you get full AJAX support without having to deal with javascript or request object or anything. Only Ruby, for 99% of the cases.

Additionally, it fits nice in its MVC architecture, and you keep all AJAX actions in a controller, where you can render back html to update a div, or return javascript code to be evaluated (which in 99% of the cases is simple code like Effect.disable(id) ). Elegant and clean.

Hi, I'm a ruby and rubyonrails coder. I find his comment useful. Let me point to another set of links then which is useful with postgresql. http://www.rubyonrails.org/ http://www.ruby-lang.org/ and yes http://www.rubyforge.org/ is useful :)

RubyOnRails is the wave of the future, not some half baked application which "boasts" anything. This type of crap is what slows real opensource development. We've all been hearing about this great RubyOnRails, and I believe the framework wars to be over. Even RubyOnRails has hit *gasp* news.com. People are integrating, and businesses are converting. http://www.rubyonrails.org/ is the real future to be. I believe if we all work on a common goal for a framework and language which isn't such a pita like jboss or php, then power will be back in the developer. Not Sun, Zend, etc :)

Seems like Ruby on Rails is competing for web apps too - lots of comparisons are floating around out there. Some large sites are converting over, too, like Derek Siver's "CD Baby" - he blogged on the conversion here.

I've certainly found Rails to be a good fit with interfacing with a Jabber PostgreSQL backend. Good times!

Yeah, the PHP files will have code mixed in with your html, which can only somewhat be mitigated by things like CSS and function imports and such, which is actually a big reason why I'm not completely sold on PHP. The php files end up looking somewhat ugly and sometimes the code is pretty convoluted.

On the flip side, I've been working with Ruby on Rails and it's beautiful. Scripts to generate the starting points for your web files, separation of design and implementation, a great framework. Only thing it lacks is a strong IDE (as far as I can tell) behind it and extensive documentation or resources on the web if you hit a wall (PHP sites are everywhere, for example).

CMR is a Web-based model..

This sounds like a job for RubyOnRails!:

"Done in 10% of the time it takes a consortium of 4 large global companies to do government funded situps!"

And Eclipse? simply the best development IDE available IMHO...... And all of that in only a few thousand lines of code.....

You're talking in generalities about complicated things you're not familiar with - it's not very productive.

Ruby - OOP language which is really quite elegant, tidy, and intuitive and has a bunch of standard APIs
Ruby on Rails - Additional structure and helpers for building a web application, written in Ruby

The only way you'll find out if you like it is to try doing something with it - if you seriously want to make a web application or something, you could get an idea of how to use it by watching the tutorial video.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/media/video/rails_take2 _with_sound.mov

It seems that AJAX, while being a rather old idea, has taken over all new webapps these days. From Gmail to the Hula Project to the fantastic looking Zimbra Collaboration Suite, this reduced reliance on the old client => server model is a great step. I found more info on Kahuna beta from someone who wrote about it back in August.

Now that I'm playing with Ruby on Rails I'll be very interested in the next 'killer app'; a Ruby on Rails/AJAX based webapp client. ...drool...

The SQL database abstraction layer is an important feature of SQLObject, that Ruby on Rails doesn't currently support -- you have to write database dependent SQL code mixed in with your Ruby code.

This doesn't look at all like database dependent SQL code... SQL queries are an option in Ruby on Rails, but active record tries to make you avoid them as much as possible.

...mentions, among other things, Ruby on Rails.

Seems like Rails is turning up everywhere. One thing's for sure, it's one of the main reasons that RubyForge now has (and needs) five file mirrors!

I'm working on a Rails app now that has both an XML-RPC front end and a web front end; it's been pretty fun to learn all the little ways Rails reduces the amount of scaffolding code in an application. Good times!

Sure ASP.NET may not be the right tool for every job, but then again what is?
As far as I can tell from the fanboys, it's either PHP or Python.

Hope that helps ;-)

Nah, that's so 2004, now it's Ruby on Rails! Get with the times! :)

revolutionary or not, "AJAX" is now used in lots of languages. and there are some good tools out there. there's ruby on rails with the prototype library which is also now available in perl. there's also CGI::Ajax which is pretty simple to apply... and it's perl!

It's not perfect, but it represents a lot of what people have learned from experience. Apple is using a version of C that fakes object orientation through a runtime and some clever preprocessing. Nobody expected objective C to be around in the year 2005.

I don't know about the rest of the comment, but this statement is completely wrong.

Objective C may be ancient and cryptic but it is and always has been fully OO. It's dynamic which means you can generate classes / subclasses / methods on the fly. Not something that C# or Java could do.

On a side-note, I used to think that these dynamic language features are too clever to use, but Ruby and Ruby on Rails have convinced me otherwise.

Learn this.

• Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
• Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards Part II

Ruby on Rails if you want to switch, Catalyst if you're comfortable with perl and don't want to switch. There are excellent introductory articles on the O'Reilly web site for both of them.

First, Rails is in Ruby. If you never used Ruby, you may think it's not a big deal. If you did, you're probably interested in Rails now, because you love Ruby.

But even if you don't care about Ruby, Rails is amazing because... well, instead of bogging you down with boring hype, I'll point to the videos on the official page (they're much cooler hype). Seriously, watch them.

But for web development, Java is generally the right choice for the backend. Lots of competent people available who will require no learning curve.

I'll have to disagree somewhat with this. Firstly, I have to take issue with the premise that because a language is well known, you can hire more competant people. For a competant programmer, the time needed to learn a new language is negligible. A competant python programmer, for instance, will be a competant java programmer.

The other difficulty I have with Java is the syntax. Java is a low level language, and thus generally unsuitable for tasks where a high level language can be used. Java's use of primatives and its reduced syntax are perfect for applications such as J2ME, but on more advanced architectures, this low level behavior becomes more of a hinderance than a benefit.

The support tools available for java on the backend are also clearly the best right now, as you pointed out (hibernate etc.). The tools for working in java are also a step ahead of anything else right now (idea and even its slightly retarded younger brother eclipse are both way ahead of the tools for any other language).

Now this I happen to agree with. Java has a lot of good tools, and most are very robust. I wouldn't really class them as a step ahead, as RoR seems a more efficient development environment, but Hibernate and Java servlets seem pretty good for designing large, complex systems.

If you combined these tools with Nice, I'd agree further. Nice is a high-level programming language that compiles into native Java bytecode. With Nice, one gets all the benefits of the Java library, along with the advantage of working in a strongly typed, high-level language with similar capabilities to Ruby or Smalltalk.

That all said, for the majority of web applications, RoR seems the better choice.

a mice ? not usefull for coding.

all I wish, is to be able to do some Rails programming (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) on this machine.

this way I would be able to work on my app (http://justbudget.com/) from anywhere....

Since all these effects are built on top of the Prototype javascript library, you can use them standalone or with any server side language. Just download the effects and the Prototype library (be sure to get the pre-release version) and you should be good to go. Nothing Ruby or Rails specific, but Rails does have some predefined helper functions to make it easier to use the AJAX effects.

Also, why does Sun waste all the effort on NetBeans? I'm sure it's a very capable IDE, but isn't nearly everyone else using Eclipse? Where would Java or Eclipse be if Sun put all the engineering time from NetBeans into a more useful project? I guess here I don't see the value of the competition as much...