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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.
When talking about commercial software like MS Office, we talk about the "Open source equivalent" OpenOffice.org and stuff like that. I'm curious to know whether there is a commercial equivalent to Ruby on Rails.
Screw that overstated "It just works" stuff. I like the truthfulness of their statement, "it works mostly right, most of the time, for most of the people"
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.
I've heard plenty about RoR on Slashdot - but to be honest, thats about where it stops. Does anyone have any experience or views deploying a medium/high volume commercial or enterprise solution using this?
I have yet to personally see RoR in either situation and I don't know anyone who has - I'm not knocking RoR, just curious how it's actually being used.
I love Ruby. Once I discovered Ruby, it's become my prefered general purpose language. I love the fact it's a pure object oriented language. I love it's consisiveness. I love it's lack of "funny" characters (for the most part).
_ an_object_oriented_language (anyone who's farmiliar with rails will understand the underscores). During those 3 weeks I just couldn't enjoy programming and couldn't get into it. I tried 2 more times over the next 2 months to try it again, but the same thing.
I freakin' can't stand using Rails. I remember getting very excited about it when I first discovered it. Watching apps being developed in 15 minutes. I read all the tutorials. I even bought the book from pragmatic programmer. I studied and wrote programs for 3 weeks. And I just could never get into it. On so many occasions I just felt cheated. It was all valid ruby code, but it just didn't seem in the spirit of ruby. My namespace was cluttered with a million methods. The names of which didn't seem logical and_reminded_me_of_php_function_names_rather_than
The biggest annoyance was automated code generation. It was almost pointless for me. 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. Well, this is what I have to do in most other web languages anyway! So what's the advantage? Scaffolding was great at this because it did everything dynamically. However, you can't reasonably keep the scaffolding because it's not meant to be your program. It's meant to be support around your program.
The experience seemed more like programming in php with a twist of mod_perl. All the reasons I wanted to get away from perl and php for web programming were back when I tried to write a large application. Rails just doesn't seem in the spirit of Ruby. It's not bad. Don't get me wrong. But it's not this revolutionary framework so many people would have you believe. Sure, it's great to show the 15 minute video. But I'd like to see the video of someone doing a large project in rails.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
You're trying to be funny, but you've got the only comment so far that mentions what I consider to be the most significant thing about Rails - convention over configuration. One reason why Rails development is so fast and often enjoyable is that you don't have to muck about with a lot of XML config files. If you just follow the path of least resistance, things just work out right.
The MVC triad in Rails uses the ActiveRecord class for the model part. ActiveRecord is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) class that follows a few clever rules about doing the mapping, so most of the time you don't have to repeat your mapping multiple times. If you have a "User" class, it knows to look for a table in the db called "users", and assumes the primary key is an integer named "id". A foreign key to an account record is assumed to be called "account_id". The creation time of a record is assumed to be a datetime named "created_at". All common elements have reasonable defaults, so when you are working on your app, you don't need to spend a lot of time mucking about with config files to specify stuff that is just so fracking obvious that it is a waste of your time to type it.
Rails is not all things to all programmers, but it has certainly hit the sweet spot for a huge class of web applications - database backed interactive sites. The Rails design is good for probably 90% of the sites that I use most.
As for coder jollies, well, it's been a while since I enjoyed programming. With Rails I've regained my enjoyment for programming enough that I'm considering doing that for the main part of my work again.