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Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released
Simon (S2) writes "Ruby on Rails 1.0 has been released. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.0 is mostly about making all the work we've been doing solid. So it's not packed with new features over 0.14.x, but has spit, polish, and long nights applied to iron out kinks and ensure that it
works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people.' " The Ruby on Rails website has also been given a new look.
Perhaps Coldfusion, WebObjects, .net, or J2EE+Struts (depending on your definition of 'commercial')
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
This is a 15 min presentation someone did setting up a weblog using it. I think this example better explains it than most descriptions I've read.
Excuse me for sounding dumb, but what is Ruby on Rails? I've heard a lot about it recently, but haven't the slightest clue what it is. A little bit of background would be most appreciated.
Ruby on Rails is a web development framework. It provides a library for Ruby so it can be used with web development allowing it to be used in applications normally reserved for other languages.
Slashdot's big on this kind of stuff today. First the Java/everything else flamewar and now this (admittedly no flamewar.)
At least it's more honest than the usual "it brings world peace and helps improve your stamina" attitude I see with other frameworks, especially within the Java community (that last clause will probably start off a flamewar :->).
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
There is a list of users at:
http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Not directly.
However, many of the problems associated with PHP are just due to flaws in the design of PHP. It's more a case of PHP being worse than it should be, rather than Ruby on Rails being extremely secure.
That said, most Ruby on Rails-related code is written by far more experienced developers. As would be expected, the quality of the code is higher, and the likelyhood of security issues is vastly reduced. The trend in the Ruby community to heavily use unit testing also helps ensure that quality is a paramount consideration.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Ruby on Rails is to mod_ruby what Fusebox is to Coldfusion.
/me = coldfusion person (I also know and use ruby a lot, and am working on learning RoR)
Coldfusion is a language of itself [albeit a simple one] that runs on top of a J2EE engine called Jrun...
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This is an MVC framework for Perl that resembles RoR in a lot of ways.
http://catalyst.perl.org/
It's very nice so far, especially the controller portion. There's lots of addons and plugins for it, all of which are entirely optional. It's actually very open-ended and easy to extend.
I use the controller classes extensively, but write my own model, view, and support classes. Catalyst culture seems to encourage Class::DBI parentage as a base model class, but it's simple to roll your own (I hate CDBI, so I based mine on Ima::DBI instead). Your classes can work independently of Catalyst... it imposes no restrictions or inheritance constraints on you. Worth checking out.
I heartily suggest that the curious among you check out http://tryruby.hobix.com/. It's a great, quick interactive introduction to ruby. You can kick around the tires (so to speak) without needing to do anything more than visit the webpage. It's a great language with or without rails.
Also a great example of Ajaxy goodness, not to buzzword it too much. It's written by the affluent and creative why. Check out his neat-o blog too: http://redhanded.hobix.com/
-mix
If you have to use Java, a copy-cat framework for Java is Trails. The linked articles make it look pretty impressive.
Another relatively unknown java framework I've flirted with very recently is Stripes. It's claim to fame is that its configuration is annotation based. Dev consists of the view and action, no worrying about an xml file to sync between the two.
Where did you get this impression? Maybe because you saw some regular expressions in Ruby? Ruby syntax is much, much clearer than Perl.
Take a look here
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Basically, Ruby on Rails saves you lots of hassle.
About 5 years ago, if you wanted to make a blog, you'd sit down and design a database schema. You'd design a controller that would have certain actions. You'd write a bunch of templates that would have variable locations. You'd extend the controller to use these templates from the db to make views. You'd write pages which allowed editing of these values. You'd write code for sanity checking. You'd write unit tests. You'd do everything over again that you'd done before.
Slashcode, Scoop, you name it -- they were all written through the same ideas.
Ruby on Rails makes all the redundant parts go away. In the video (which I just watched, and finally gives me a compelling reason to learn and use Ruby), the person sits down and generates a basic controller for their blog. They then show that the basic templates generated will show text. It takes another 5 minutes to define a db called posts and generate a default action for it. The code is smart enough to just directly make the things like title and body editable widgets on the page. 5 minutes to have posted blogs!
Then the video takes 5 minutes to extend this by writing about 15 lines of code. This has a big effect: the listing of posts is abstracted out into a block that can be included in any page. The ordering is reversed. The title attribute is made a required field.
But what good is a blog without comments? In the final 5 minutes, the author quickly adds a comment table, generates a comment controller, says that posts own comments, sticks in 3 lines of code in the post view segment which do a foreach associated comment, display, and then adds a page to edit comments. They also (at the same time) show us the basics of the unit-testing framework you get "for free" (the basic test is return true, but he changed it to test if the comment post code worked with another 4 lines of code).
The entire thing took 15 minutes to write and had 58 lines of code. When the db schema changed, the code adapted -- the programmer did not have to rewrite the code. When the programmer wanted to change anything, the code would quickly bend itself to the task.
I dare say it's the sexiest thing I've seen yet. If they ever release a version 2 that allows for simple Javascript on the client for AJAX interfaces, there will be only 1 game in town for web development!
I'm not inexperienced in web design. I have written my own stuff to test ideas out, as well as participated in Scoop's development to a degree. Recently I've been playing with Drupal because all the basics are setup with it, and you can just extend it with modules. I can honestly say that while it took me an hour to setup Drupal (and another hour to get it completely to how I liked it) it a test config, I could probably replicate the base distribution plus the modules I use in Ruby on Rails within a day -- maybe 2, if I'm slow. It's that effective!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
ROR has been compared to hibernate+struts, in fact I believe much of the motivation behind ROR was to create a more full featured hibernate solution.
ROR isn't as mature as j2ee struts+hibernate but it will be soon. ROR has tons of potential.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
For a window platform, download Instant Rails
Or for linux, install mod_scgi and follow the instructions here
It's stinkin' easy, I can do it in about 5 minutes. Any hosting admin worth their salt can even script it in about 10 minutes.
if you're referring to a lack of odd people in the ruby community you'll be horrified to know there's many.
thanks for your post, all valid opinion .. i just suspect you're one of these highly intelligent programmers that trip over some minor features you find annoying and then blow your frustrations out of perspective.
(anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores)
granted some of the method names are overly verbose! i've thought that often when looking through the APIs and docs. but that criticism needs to be tempered by pointing out the verbose methods are used very infrequently. 99% of the methods i use are small and concise, like: truncate(), h(), link_to(), redirect() etc.
The biggest annoyance was automated code generation
see this i'm finding hard to understand. when i want to start a new model and controller, i type a line in a prompt, and it makes the few files i need to begin. 'begin' being the operative word. there endeth the code generation.
my method of automated code generation is copy and paste.
If I made changes to the database, I either had to a) wipe the directory and start over reimplementing my changes. Or b) go through all the MVC code and find the references to the database
i've NEVER experienced this. never never never. and i have no idea what you're talking about. one of the real clinchers of rails for me is its use of ActionRecord to interface with the database. i modify my database constantly without breaking any code. the only case i can think of when what you describe could happen is if i were to rename a column in the database, then my row.name object wouldn't match. but i would consider a broken website due to this the fault of a stupid developer.
to be able to connect to my database, retrieve a record and update it, in 1 line in some cases, becomes rather neccessary for a developer once they've tried it.
will do all of these. i take a wee dance on the grave of large-scale php development everytime i use that.But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails
and here is where i'm convinced that you are what i think you are (an intelligent programmer who's taken big issue over minor irritations). large scale use of rails is very easy to find if you visit the rails site . It's also very easy to find a larger list, and a list of interesting apps to boot. granted, not moving pictures, but .. oh go away.
Installed Rails Apps (open source): (sorry, no links to my domain, must avoid
How is this different? I only worry about one Terms of Service, imposed by the web host. I control all aspects of the deployment of the Rails apps. So the blog is not just my blog, its a blog at my domain (or sub-domain if I perfer), and I control the databases that store its content. In fact, I control every aspect of the blog. For instance, I could make the blog appear and disappear based upon phases of the moon. Can you do that with any blog host, just by changing two links at a shell prompt?
The same goes for every other Rails app I have deployed on my server account. The Rails principles of "don't repeat yourself" (DRY) and convention over configuration, meant that once I installed one Rails app, the experience was immediately applicable to installing the rest. They all have the same directory structure, and the same configuration file for database connection, which is the only configuration file you must edit.
The rest just works, usually. You have to check your versions, and make sure your app and Rails work at the current version. I admit I have experience building server side web projects using VB6 DLL and ASP.NET, along with equally strong UNIX background, so I was able to tweak a few things and proceed when they didn't work the first time. Don't dispair, I was able to make it work after a few hours of checking on-line forums, and trying some suggestions.
Software freedom...I love it!