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

Re:YASLFFFSC

[MemoryDragon]

Actually no, Rails has heavily inspired many developments in many languages over the last year. Pretty much every framework currently at least is looking at the stuff the rails guys are doing and whether some of the concepts are viable. Stuff like Seam which also is excellent is heavily inspired by the ease of use metaphor of Rails, and the Prototype javascript libary used by rails currently sort of becomes a defacto standard for more advanced javascript stuff with many projects building on top of it. Rails definitely does not scale into the average J2EE project dimensions, but it has its merits and definitely made huge inroads in the web development domain over the last year.

Summary of thread

[physicsphairy]

"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?"

"Yes." -- some slashdotters
"No." -- other slashdotters

Oh, and your horoscope for today is "Give generously to people you meet online who make you laugh."

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!

Re:Watch the demo...

[fak3r]

Wow - thanks to all that are hitting my site, I'm sitting here at work watching multitail try and keep up with all the requests on my home server! Typo uses Lighttpd (I have Apache2 running, but it's using mod_proxy to pass all requests to fak3r.com to Lighttpd) which is supposed to be 'lighter' and perform much better under load than Apache. I assume that's true because the logs are flying by, and the log from the Typo server is saying things like:

Completed in 0.01254 (79 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.00618 (49%) | DB: 0.00146 (11%) [http://fak3r.com/articles/search?q=bsd%5D

Am I reading this right? Most are coming up with 10-40 /reqs/second, but damn, this is on a homeserver (FreeBSD 6.0 - 1.2Gig - 512Megs) with a 384/1.5 DSL! I'm doing full refreshes here and not seeing any obvious lag - I've never had this much sustained traffic, but this looks very good for Lighttpd! (only been using it for this blog, which started ~ a week ago). Checking top I see 'ruby' but it's way down there, below multilog/tail and such... Hmm...need to check that migration from Apache to Lighty perhaps! ;)

For those late to the party, that's fak3r.com! (just try and bring it down hehe...)

Re:we already know

[MemoryDragon]

Actually many web developers keep a constant eye on rails, I am heavy into J2EE and like it, especially the stuff which is coming along Seam, Spring, JSF and EJB3, but almost every one I know who works in the domain, keeps an eye on rails as a fallback option for quick small webapps. Besides that many concepts and libaries currently are heavily evaluated for inclusion into other frameworks.

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.

Re:Finally, a breath of fresh air

[Krimszon]

I can't feel frameworks take away my control. It's like I want to do all those things myself, even though I know I can't do it as good as them. Also, I don't know if I can ever really understand what it is, only that I have to type something like :scaffold whatever and I'll hit the ground running. Wonderful, but...

I feel like the real skill of development lies in making stuff like that, and if it becomes defacto, all you do is build applications from building blocks. I feel it takes away some of the 'art' of development. You'd say, oh I build a nice webshop, and the other person would sya, what did you use, and your answer wouldn't be php, mysql, some html/css and javascripting. It'd be Ruby on Rails, of Smarty Templates combined with some Data Access layer, or a whole lot of those java spring/hibernate thingies. And all you did was tie up the ends.

I know it makes no sense not to use it, it's much a better choice. Make more money, easier, faster. But still, there's that feeling, know what I mean?

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.

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!

Dear Slashdot

[VAXGeek]

Dear Slashdot:

                At this point, I am quite aware of Ruby on Rails. It is agile, the next big thing, etc. Could you possibly link a few more half brewed articles about AJAX, Ruby, and Rails? "Ruby's the next big thing!" "Ruby's hot!" Wow, really?! It certainly has more hype than anything else out there. I think if it was really that good, there would be less people hyped about it and more people actually using it. I've heard about 50000 people say it is the next perl. Of course, with perl6 highly late, who knows what will happen.

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.

The ultimate contrarian answer to this question

[hey!]

Is that there is no answer. At least no answer that is ten words or less and covers every possible case.

People who say that business logic never belongs in the database are people who tend to be application developers. They are committed to a client platform (say j2ee), and database platforms (oracle and postgres and the like) vary from client to client.

People who own data on the other hand tend to have the database platform constant, but need to get at it and manipulate it from multiple platforms (j2ee, perl, VB, Access etc.) A viable definition of "database" in my book is a collection of data that is organized to be reused across apps.

A choice algorithm I'd use is this: If it has to do with the logical consistency of the data, it belongs in the database tier. If it is only possible to meet the needs of the project you are doing in one way, choose that way. Otherwise decide what part of your system is least likely to change, try to put as much as you can there.

The closest I can get to my self imposed ten word limit is this:

Business logic belongs in the tier you're most committed to.

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

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.

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.

Re:we already know

[Senzei]

True that. You can't bring up anything related to web apps without some rails drone coming out an spewing how wonderful rails is and that if jesus were a programmer, that's what he'd be using. /yawn

Which, as we all know, is an outright lie. If jesus were a programmer he would write a lisp routine so advanced that A) only god could actually understand it, and B) he would just have to think about a website for it to be written.

After all, if I were jesus, that is what I would do.