What is Ruby on Rails?

Robby Russell writes "ONLamp.com has published another article by Curt Hibbs titled, 'What is Ruby on Rails?.' In this article, Curt goes on to discuss all the major components of the popular Rails web framework and shows it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This article highlights all the major features, from Active Record to Web Services, which are going to be included in the upcoming 1.0 RC release of Ruby on Rails. With one book published already and four more on the way, do you think Rails will continue gaining as much popularity in the coming year?" An interesting follow-up to the two part tutorial from earlier this year.

Comments

I bet it does it all by convention...NOT!

[irritating environme]

Oh, so if you have a non-vanilla RoR legacy database, it does ORM to accomodate that all via convention not configuration right? Very little effort, right?

No details though in most articles. Just ground-up stuff that looks to be competing with LAMP projects, and the pro-RoR articles all mirror that general attitude, not the least of whom is Curt Hibbs.

Yet all the really grizzled Java guys who have to deal with real-world legacy and enterprise ugliness list off a host of problems that Java has documented, mature projects with, and the RoR people say "Oh, RoR can do that with VERY LITTLE EFFORT...and don't point to anything."

Let's be honest here, the base ActiveRecord is a Wizard/Code Generator. All that zero-config falls apart once you get out of the baby carriage and into real-world stuff. So quit pushing that all over the place.

I won't deny it's promising, but it is immature as hell.