Ajax On Rails

mu-sly writes "Ajax and Rails - probably two of the biggest buzzwords in web development at the moment. In this article over at ONLamp, Curt Hibbs introduces the incredibly powerful Ajax support that is part of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It's a great read, and serves as a gentle introduction to the cool stuff you can accomplish with ease using the Ajax features of Rails."

Comments

Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.

[newdamage]

I'm sure many developers like myself have a day job that probably involves J2EE. The first time I did the iniitial tutorials for Rails several weeks ago I was blown away. Connecting to a database is not susposed to be this easy.

Even when using newer frameworks like Spring, Tapestry and Hibernate (I hate you so much Struts) Rails still manages to be easier.

I highly suggest any developers looking for a change of pace at least give Ruby on Rails a few hours of your evening. While it's not nearly as comprehensive as Java, it's gaining libraries and functionality by leaps and bounds.

And just so I don't get labeled as a Rails fanboy/Java basher: Rails is not perfect, I still would recommend using J2EE for large corporate projects. It's just a much more mature solution with less unknowns. I think Rails needs another year at least before people are ready to really give it a shot in the corporate environment.

Re:Rails, great for those fed up with J2EE.

[Cyberax]

First, you have some misconeptions about J2EE.

True, you can't just drop J2EE on your desktop because there's no such _thing_ as J2EE. J2EE is a set of standards (which contains just about everything).

The only things you need to start developing J2EE applications are: Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html), optionally a web-framework (like http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/index.html) and you can start developing tomorrow (if you know Java of course) and a decent IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/). It will cost you about $0.

Java has some metaprogramming featues starting from version 1.5. Right now we're writing application in C++ and Python, so I don't miss metaprogramming features :)

RoR is extensible, but some features are just very hard to implement: maintaning persistent object identity, complex mappings support, distributed caching and long-running transactions with optimistic locking.

We had previous expirience in dynamic languages (Python, Perl, PHP). This project was a sort of expirement - we wanted to see what can be done with RoR.