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.

Comments

Re:"mostly right"???

[Tyler Eaves]

I'd prefer to look at it as honesty.

Re:"mostly right"???

[IAmTheDave]

"mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people."??? Is this the standard by which the Ruby community judges software goodness? I'm speechless.

Yeah, it's not great, but at least it's honest. Go on any developer site - MSDN, java.sun.com, whatever, and you'll see a nice long list of submitted bugs. Fact is, no software is perfect, so don't go crazy when they admit there might be uncaught bugs.

Re:"mostly right"???

[CyricZ]

That's a far higher standard than you'll find used by most commercial developers.

Remember, Ruby is at the forefront of the agile development community. Many developments in unit testing, for instance, directly involve Ruby. Ruby developers are often the most experienced at effectively employing such development techniques.

And you know what? It shows. Ruby software is often of extremely high quality. It's not perfect, but there is much effort taken to ensure correctly-functioning code.

Re:"mostly right"???

[Tyler Eaves]

ANYONE who claims everything works perfectly is a lying sack of shit. It's as simple as that. The only way to come anywhere close to being able to make that claim would be to heavily qualify it, e.g., With Database X on OS Y, version Z, and library versions A, B, C, on hardware platform D. Anything more broad than that is just not a valid claim.

Jebus, has the poster or mod ever used rails??????

[porkThreeWays]

The point of rails is to have sensible defaults that work most of the time. Web apps share A LOT of commonality. The idea is to take out repitiveness as much as possible. This is done with sensible defaults. If these aren't good for you, they can be changed. But it's meant to have reasonable defaults for most, unlike certain web languages that make you start from scratch every time.

You speak of momentum.

[CyricZ]

Only an individual new to the computing industry would put much faith in "momentum".

I've been around it for decades. I remember when Honeywell and Data General had "momentum". I'd be surprised if you've ever even seen a picture of their hardware.

A bit later there was CP/M. And Apple. Apple had much "momentum" in the 1980s, only to almost hit rock bottom. At least they've been able to pick themselves up again.

There was even talk this morning about Java losing its "momentum".

Ruby on Rails could very well overtake PHP quite quickly.

While some onus does rest on developers to develop quality code, that does not mean that the language and any implementations should not take steps to limit the ability of the programmer to write faulty code.

That holds especially true for languages that are used in hostile environments, such as the WWW. Considering that Web development is touted as PHP's strong point, one would think it would have excellent security. Of course, we know from experience that that is not the case.

Ruby won't necessarily make your code perfect. But Ruby, along with sound development techniques (unit testing, for example), will result in very secure applications. The use of PHP, on the other hand, is basically an invitation for security issues. It is not a well designed language, and it is not well implemented.

One word

[hey!]

Prototype.

Next time there is a project to X, do a prototype of some of the functions in RoR, ostensibly so you can get it done in a couple of days and you can use it to figure out requirements. After playing with a couple of days, sit back and watch as the app dev group spends a month laying the keel for their "enterprise" class implementation. Continue to use your prototype to demonstrate new requirements (they always come up). If, after three or four months, the app dev group doesn't appear close to being able to deliever any business value, then one question that management should raise is what, exactly, is the property of "enterprise" that justifies the difference in effort between rails and whatever they're using. Then determine if it could indeed be put in the RoR prototype. If so, you're in. If not, you've contributed to requirements understanding and live to fight another day.