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

Strange Vibe from the Article

[WhoDey]

TFA seems to be written by a used car salesman. Or maybe those guys on the infomercials late night for different "enhancement" drugs.

Finally, a breath of fresh air

[some_canadian_hacker]

It's good to see that a structured methodology is being introduced into the world of web development. I've seen some really shoddy implementations of *SQL APIs into a myriad of differing web platforms, and because this helps to tie together the actual implementation of database-driven web apps, the developers are freeer to work on other things... security issues? Maintaining database structure? Doing the groceries? It doesn't matter all that much when less time is spent making the framework for a web application.

Looks promising.

I've been using it...

[Fished]

I've been using RoR, and I'm convinced that it is not just a flash in the pan. Let me preface this by saying that I've programmed in just about everything out there... from perl/mod_perl/cgi development, to php, to Zope, to Java, to Struts, etc. I have never seen a framework that makes it so easy to quickly develop well-architected applications as rails. A lot of the credit for this goes to two things. First, Rails features, out of the box, excellent use of automation to setup the structure of your app for you. I can have basic CRUD functionality for a table with literally one command ('script/generate scaffold TableName'). Second, Rails has a built-in ORM layer (ActiveRecord) that greatly simplifies everything, in particular because it is very good ORM.

On one of the Rails pages they talk about a functional website in less times than other frameworks would have you spend on XML situps, and I have to agree. (Excursus: am I the only one who is underwhelmed with XML for application configuration? Apparently not!) Everything depends much less on configuration and much more on convention. This means less code to debug, which means more time to write the really distinctive stuff that was why you were custom-coding an app in the first place.

Ruby is also a dream come true. The speed of perl, the OO features of python, but without perl's crufty syntax and python's rigidity. Where in the past Ruby was often poorly documented, and sometimes slow and buggy, it has largely overcome these limitations.

Try rails. You'll like it.

Re:I've been using it...

[phurley]

I have also been using it -- and love it, but a quick note (not that I think it is that important generally speaking) -- ruby is not as fast as perl. It still uses an interpreted syntax tree, that is not as fast as perl's bytecode interpreter. YARV, should fix this, but it is still development level code.

Of course having said that, the heavy lifting in ruby (like most scripting languages) is implemented in C, and I rarely have application performance issues with my ruby programs (including but not limited to rails). When there is a performance problem, ruby has very nice benchmarking/profiling tools and a good extension system for writing code in C/C++, so for me this is a non issue.

Heavyweights taking on Rails

[Bruce Perens]

I visit Fortune 100 companies in my work for Sourcelabs. The managers comment that their engineers are clamoring to use Rails and the managers are holding back until the product is more mature. They continue to watch the trend.

There are some interesting sites. Note Epson Developers. You might find this note about a large medical application interesting. I also noted a Rails project being developed in a department of the New York City government.

Bruce

Already covered this compared to Java...

[bADlOGIN]

Don't let your Java get run out on a Rail just yet
My opinion hasn't changed much since.

Re:Watch the demo...

[fak3r]

Yep, mostly what I'm seeing (apache's http-access.log and typo/logs) are straight web-server access (mod_proxy on apache -> lighttpd) but plenty of 'live searches' (which is why I suggested it) when fcgi (dispatch.fcgi) takes over and chats with the database. Still, even those are coming back faster than I'd expected. Yes, I've had 1 minute refreshes of the front page, but I didn't expect it to be perfect, I've just never had this kinda sustained traffic to study, and am really impressed with how Typo/Lighttpd are working.

It's just something when it's a box that you built by hand from newegg parts, then installed/tweaked freebsd on, and then setup a new blog just a few weeks back, to see it perform.

Re:Rails and legacy databases

[talonyx]

how about:

PURR: PostgreSQL, UNIX, Ruby and Rails

or RAPR: Rails on Apache, PostgreSQL, and Ruby
(kinda motorola type thing)