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

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."

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...)

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.

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.