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

Watch the demo...

[fak3r]

Before any bashes it as being a flash in the pan, watch the demo and see the framework that it provides and how natural it is to build webapps on top of. Truly an interesting language for the web.

Speaking of, why don't you check out my Ruby on Rails/Typo based blog, fak3r.com ;) be sure to try out that 'live search' (try 'bsd') for a taste of RoR/AJAX fun!

Learn Ruby Book

[N8F8]

I came across this awesome (actually funny) online book teaching Ruby: why's (poignant) guide to ruby

Big Nerd Ranch has Ruby on Rails Bootcamp

[bignerdranch]

Marcel Molina (one of the Core Ruby on Rails Team members) is teaching a five-day Ruby/Ruby on Rails bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch, December 5 - 9.. I work for Big Nerd Ranch, so I'm biased, but I think it is going to be an incredible class. - Aaron Hillegass

My experience

[spludge]

I'm a somewhat experienced web developer and I have developed significant applications (1000s users) in Java, .NET and PHP (and a little Perl). I recently tried out Ruby on Rails and, so far, it is by far the best web development environment that I have seen.

It forces you to create a web application that is done-right(tm). The way it forces you is very insidious. If you create your application and database in a certain way then everything is very simple and easy to do. If you stray outside that way though, then suddenly you have to do so much more work. In this way you are led down the path of least resistance to a good design, and it actually works! Please try it for a week or two before you dismiss this, I was skeptical too :)

In Java to get the same functionality that I would get for free in rails I might have to use: Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts. The amount of configuration that all of those things take is very daunting, and can often have issues. Rails will give you all that functionality (well most of it) for free.

There *are* problems with with rails. The biggest in my mind is documentation. The wiki sucks. You really have to buy the Agile Web Development With Rails book to learn, but hopefully that will improve. This lack of documentation makes it hard when you want to stray outside of the framework. Rails really needs the equivalent of the PHP documentation with annotated comments.

Anyways, Rails is here to stay. I'm sure of that now having tried it myself. It feels painful to have to go back and develop in other languages for web development now!

New Security Framework for Ruby on Rails

[Bruce Perens]

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.

• Home Page
• Tutorial.
• Reference.
• RubyForge project.

Rails and legacy databases

[matchboy]

Quite a few people have dismissed Ruby on Rails because they think that it enforces a set of rules about how to structure your database. I am currently writing, Programming Rails for O'Reilly and have posted numerous articles on my blog on the topic of Rails and Legacy database systems. Rails can be molded to fit your existing infrastructure with very little effort. It's all I have been using for new projects since last spring... and that was when I started learning Ruby as well.

PostgreSQL + Ruby + Rails = the next (lamp)

PRR, RPR, RRP... we need a cool acronym

Instant Rails

[matchboy]

Curt Hibbs (author of that Rails article) has just released Instant Rails.

Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/

Re:More than just Scaffold

[fleadope]

The developers of Rails are quite clear that they are trying to create a framework for developing a web applications, leaving the actual implementation of all the application logic, including security (or lack thereof!) up to the application developer.
That being said, I know of at least three secirity implementations being actively worked on and used (in order from least to greatest complexity):

1) There is a generator on the rails wiki:

A controller/model/view generator for easily adding authentication, users, and logins to your rails app.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/LoginGener ator

2) Bruce Perens has just released ModelSecurity:

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ModelSecurity/

3) ActiveRBAC

The goal of this project is to create a portable, simple but effective RBAC implementation with common User infrastructure and models for Rails.

https://rbaconrails.turingstudio.com/trac/wiki

There has also been considerable work done on a component model that will make these even easier to use and extend.