Rolling With Ruby On Rails

Bart Braem writes "The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that makes database-backed apps dead simple. What's the fuss? Is it worth the hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails at ONLamp, building a simple application that even non-Rubyists can follow."

Comments

Ruby still needs ISP support

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest drawback to RubyOnRails is that you wont find it installed on very many webhosts.

I given it a testdrive, and RubyOnRails is an amazingly fast and powerful way to develop webapps, but even so, it's been around for a while and still 99% of webhosts only stick to tomcat & PHP/MySQL, so that's what I code for. Even Python w/o Rails has more ISP support.

My question is: When will RubyOnRails get "popular enough" to make inroads? I'm looking forward to it, because it means I can be way more productive and get a head start on all the other PHP "solution providers" out there.

Re:Nice framework...

[Paradox]

Sir, may I ask you exactly how you're going to get your Java framework of choice to connect, comprehend, and dynamically bind to a SQL table in only 2 lines of code? Because that's what you're going to have to do to beat Rails in code count. For instance, if we have a table called "Clients". It has lots of fields.

If we want to link it to Rails, we'd use the following code:

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
end

Yeah. That's really it. And you can specify relations with a simple micro-language in the class declaration (that's based out of ruby syntax). Once you've done this, you can write code like this:

my_client = Client.find( 26 ) # Find by primary key
my_client2 = Client.find_by_manager_id( 12 ) # Find by some field

# This code prints out each client's id and name
Client.find_all.each do |c|
puts "#{c.id}: #{c.name}
end

And Rails makes the action mappings just as simple. I'd eat my old shoes before I'd believe that there is some lurking JSP/Servlet framework that has evaded my sight (and everyone's sight, really) that can do better. I know Java's limitations pretty well.

Rails is awesome

[swimmar132]

I've almost finished developing a real estate site using it. First time using Rails.

In PHP or other related language, probably would've taken me about 80 hours or so to develop the site. In Rails, I've spent maybe 15 hours or so total on it. And I'm charging $8k for the site. Admittedly, that doesn't include time working on the graphics or design of the site, just the backend, search, etc.

So if you look at it from one perspective, I went from making $100 an hour to $533 an hour using Rails!