RAD with Ruby

Amit Upadhyay writes "KDE's award winning integrated development environment KDevelop, has integrated support for Ruby, an excellent and easy to use object oriented scrpting language. If you are looking for a good programming tool for quickly developing a professional one off application, Ruby (with KDE bindings) maybe just the thing for you. There is a quick tutorial and an online book to get you started. You may also want to read a quite informative comparison of Python with Ruby. If you are web developer or write enterprise applications with JAVA etc, take a look at Ruby on Rails(api), they have a nice blog too. KDevelop provides a GUI builder and Debugger for rapid application development(RAD) with Ruby, which is getting better. There is a nice tutorial on using KDE libraries with Ruby. And if you have lots of code in C/C++, extending Ruby to use them is easy.
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Comments

Another scripting language

[putko]

I'm quite partial to scsh.
I mention this because I understand Ruby's semantics are like Scheme (but the syntax is different, or we'd call it a Scheme).

The intro from the scsh paper (Olin Shivers) convinced me to try it out:

"Shell programming terrifies me. There is something about writing a simple shell script that is just much, much more unpleasant than writing a simple C program, or a simple COMMON LISP program, or a simple Mips assembler program ..."

He's not talking about a simple shell program (like "rm -fr /") -- but something with variables, control flow, conditionals, etc.

Crossplatform Ruby

[beware1000]

I actually wish I had had these details all in one place when I was looking afew months back (abit of googling eventually showed all those pages).
Personally, I have found if you are really interested in RAD w/ Ruby + QT is fine for linux.

But Wx is cross platform and free! and tools like VisualWx which has support for WxRuby certainly help.

Unfortunately it is only on windows atm AFAIK

Why reimplement Ruby?

[kahei]

Well, the trouble is that Ruby is a great language in search of a good implementation.

The current Ruby implementation has various weaknesses -- primitive text support is the most mentioned one (you can't step through a string char by char, I kid you not). Lack of native threading (it uses weird homemade application-level threads) some concurrency issues (it's C with lots of static variables -- I may be very out-of-date here though) and integration problems (it's very much designed with a 'C and UNIX and nothing else' mindset) are also problematic.

Thus, a port of Ruby to the Java or .net runtime, that kept the language intact but performed text processing, threading etc via those runtimes, would be absolutely amazing. The .net one stalled, though -- maybe the Java one is doing better.

Re:Why reimplement Ruby?

[kahei]

(this goes for both comments above)

I'm referring to stepping through a string character by character -- I should have said that rather than 'char by char', which is open to misinterpretation. I meant 'text character' rather than a C 'char' type, which can indeed be done with 'each_byte'.

For instance, a lot of strings contain Asian characters that are intrinsically more than 1 byte long, or combining characters which consist of a 'main' character and 1 (for most european languages) or more (for the nightmare that is Vietnamese) accent marks. To ruby, it's all just bytes -- if 64 A7 03 A7 04 means an 'a' with an acute accent and a dot, ruby will cheerfully give you those 5 seperate bytes and let you implement the concept of a character yourself.

There are various libraries for Ruby that extend the string class to handle text in different languages and encodings, but this is still nothing like as good as just being able to get, set, read, write, and match characters, as I can in most other high-level environments. Unfortunately, while the concept of a text encoding is built into ruby, it is hardcoded with knowledge of a few particular encodings and it only uses them for IO -- in internal processing, it's welcome to the wonderful world of each_byte.

All this would go away (along with many other issues) if there were an implementation of Ruby for some modern runtime environment such as Java.

This situation and the discussions behind it is one of the things that inspired me to write this essay (which may or may not be interesting, I just mention it):

http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html

Someone please tell me what I gain over Python?

[_am99_]

I learned Python last winter and have not looked back to Java despite being a Java programmer since it was in wide-distribution.

And since Python makes win32 programming easy for those who don't use Visual Studio, I have learned to be a Windows programmer over the last couple of weeks.

What do I gain over Python by switching to Ruby? I see a lot of explainations, but as far as I can tell, in addition to the awesomeness of Python's language and libraries, these are the things that I need that I can't seem to find in Ruby(but might not be looking in the right place):

1) Java byte-code compiling (jython)
2) full win32 APIs
3) full win32 COM access
4) Complete Object Database implementation (ZODB)
5) List-comprehension

Someone please educate me on the advantages of Ruby over Python. Cause right now, it is hard to imagine a better language than the snake!

Re:Why Ruby?

[slamb]

From where I stand (don't know Ruby, rarely use SQL) the Ruby example is easy to understand, and the SQL example is far from obvious.

To someone who uses SQL frequently, the code I gave is obvious. (It'd be even more so if slashdot allowed me to indent it properly.) And most people making code to access a RDBMS will have used SQL recently, because they just designed a schema to access. The tool doesn't do that for you.

With object-relational tools, you need to know more than you did before. There's much more complexity and bloat in the system. And the resulting SQL is crap. There's no benefit.

"Premature optimisation is the root of all evil"

More accurately, "premature micro-optimization is the root of all evil". You will save a lot of effort by choosing an efficient high-level design right away. Passing around objects that tie you to an object-relational tool like this one is not an efficient high-level design.

The point is that unless some analysis shows that that particular piece of Ruby code causes an unacceptable bottleneck within the context of the application (from the point of view of the user), then stick with the code that is shorter, simpler, easier to write and easier to maintain.

Yes, that particular piece of Ruby code would cause an unacceptable bottleneck. In many organizations (including mine), the database server and the webserver are not the same. Imagine every round trip taking 50ms and you'll begin to understand. The number of round trips must be O(1) for acceptable performance, and the closer to 1, the better. That's not true for the Ruby code. It makes m + n round trips, where m is the number of roles for that user, and n is the number of permissions for that user. So if that's 20 (depending on how granular permissions are, that's not unlikely), that will add a second per hit. Ugh.

I guess part of what you are saying is that there are existing (old) technologies that are better in some sense if only people would take the time and effort to learn about them, rather than chasing the flavour of the month. If that is part of your message then I whole-heartedly agree. I like fvwm!

In part. But mostly, it doesn't make sense to add on layers of complexity unless they accomplish something for you. This layer does not, and it does take away your performance.