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Exploring Active Record
An anonymous reader writes "Everyone knows that no programming language is a perfect fit for every job. This article launches a 'new series by Bruce Tate that looks at ways other languages solve major problems and what those solutions mean to Java developers. He first explores Active Record, the persistence engine behind Ruby on Rails.'"
By looking at Active Record Java developers can be happy and thankful they have a language taking good advantage of Unicode, unlike Ruby which treats users of non-ASCII alphabets (the overwhelming majority of people on Earth) as second-class citizens thanks to poor Unicode support.
What sort of programming models? Frameworks? How in God's name does a framework reduce maintainability as compared to some C programmer's PHP spaghetti code?
If you don't like it, don't use it. Like every other tool/framework/system ever developed, Rails will work for some and not for others. I've found Rails to be extremely productive and maintainable, but I'm an OOP die-hard and the approach is easy for me to grok.
One thing I like about ActiveRecord is that it is database agnostic. If I need to, I can move my app from MySQL to Postgres to Oracle with very little effort. The other thing I like is that it provides a clean separation between data storage and business logic. Database programmers seem to hate that approach because it shifts the center of gravity away from the database and toward the web app. This is great for maintainability of application code, but I don't know how well it works for sharing data among multiple apps. I don't know if anyone has gotten ActiveRecord models to support the same level of integration as you can get with multiple apps running off of one database - I think there needs to be more work done to enable that, but I expect to see that work done fairly soon.
The other cool thing about ActiveRecord is the use of metaprogramming, as discussed in the FA. I don't think we'll ever see a Java persistence layer that is as functional and easy to use as ActiveRecord, because the kind of metaprogramming tricks that Ruby enables are so much harder to do in Java.
Um...sorry, I have to disagree. Using a well-known framework makes a project anything but unmainatainable. Let's say a project is written with a framework, and the original developers no longer supports it, or he leaves your company, or whatever. At the very least there are many people out there with a basic understanding of the framework, and thus a basic understanding of the code. You can hire a Rails consultant and be fairly confident that he will be able to pick up where the old developer(s) left off. Try doing that with some custom framework (or, even worse with no framework at all). I know from personal exerience that it is very difficult to pick up a new framework; it can take weeks, and even after that it's not totally intuitive.
Furthermore, Rails promotes good coding and design habits. While you may not agree with Model-View-Controller (not sure why, but that's a personal choice I guess), at least Rails imposes some design pattern on the developer. Without this, an inexperienced developer will be able to write completely unmaintainable code.
A background of incompetence? Funnily enough when I picked up PHP, your disaster scenario was what most people seem to do without thinking about it. In my case, the MVC components are, respectively, PostgreSQL, HTML templates and PHP.
If your original system was designed with MVC in mind, moving it to Rails should have been easy.
I think you'll find that most Rails developers hold that it's much easier, cleaner and safer to start a project with Rails in hand, rather than graft Rails onto a pre-existing database.
What if you forget a single function call at the beginning of one of those pages? Do you suddenly allow objects to be populated with rogue data? Rails has things like filters that make sure certain methods get executed before all actions in a given controller.
Error checking and testing suites aren't impossible for a C developer to comprehend, you know.
Don't Hate, Gestate
everyone has their syntax preference, but at the end of the day its the paradigm you apply that matters and not the language.
.NET development house. You may not understand why C# is better for you than C++, your productivity may not increase, but the fact that you have switched means that your software will ultimately still cause fewer problems.
The differences between C++, C#, and VisualBasic are far deeper than syntactic. C#, for example, guarantees fault isolation, while C++ does not. C# has full reflection, while C++ does not. Programmer productivity in different languages can be orders of magnitude different.
Of course, most working programmers have the same superficial view of programming languages as you do and will make the same glib and ill-informed analogies to natural languages that you did. That's why people keep choosing C and C++, believing the differences to other languages to be merely syntactic, and then producing code that crashes, silently mangles data, and has gaping security holes.
Fortunately, the herd mentality is driving even people who don't know what they are doing away from C/C++. Even your own company bills itself as a
Which bit is causing you the problem - Ruby or Rails? My understanding is that Rails is simply providing, well, Rails to give you a rapid framework for your Ruby app - provides you with a web page that's a 'default form' along with the related MVC code. It's similar to other frameworks that provide default pages from ORM mapped classes in other languages, but I thought it was Ruby, rather than Rails, that was getting people excited.
I'm an 'SQL' guy myself and I'm not convinced by ORM tools - or at least the way they're being hyped as a solution for having to understand the DB (Newsflash : SQL is supposed to be an abstract query language so that the developer doesn't need to understand the DB - and look how that worked - answer : Mostly it does, but when it goes wrong you're dealing with a black box). I also think that the view of many Java (and Ruby) developers that a DB provides 'persistence' is wrong. It's a failure to understand relational theory - which at least, unlike most object modelling techniques, has a firm mathematical foundation. It's also a failure to use the tools provided to you (and when Bruce Tate complains about Java productivity, this tendency of Java developers might be part of the problem - it's 'not invented here' syndrome).
You could have used Ruby rather than PHP (a comparison I'd like to see) and I also think that there is much to be said for the MVC structure compared to shoving everything into each page.
It feels a bit clunky in the current paradigm (pages generated on the server and refreshed to the client, client events sent to server) but it works very well as a design, and I can see it becoming more important again as browser apps support more dynamic features - getting back more towards a client-server architecture with the model on the server, view on the client. (Or more likely a local model for performance and some form of background syncing).
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
Inexperience and ignorance. And it sounds as if it applies to you and to this situation. I don't see how you can rant against "bloated" technologies you never bothered to learn. Without that knowledge, you don't understand everything that's happening behind the scenes and, since that scares you, you stick with the subset of the developmentatl universe you do know, no matter how appropriate, or inappropriate, it may be to the problem at hand.
I strongly suspect that once you've moved on to other victims, the next developer the guy hires will take one look at your carefully-crafted optimum solution, shudder, and then rewrite the whole thing.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
So... you basically wrote the application (minus the controller), and then started thinking about using a different platform? Is it any surprise that you didn't want to switch over to Rails (disclaimer: I'm not a Rails guy. In fact, I work for the competition)?
OK. It's not like somebody's holding a gun to your head and saying you have to use a framework. Personally, I see a lot of use cases where a framework makes development a lot simpler and easier to manage, because so much of the tedious overhead of web-app development has already been done for you. Think of the framework in terms of an operating system you're programming for: rather than writing all your own device drivers, routines for drawing stuff on the screen, accepting keyboard/mouse input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. And with a framework, rather than write database drivers, routines for accepting and routing input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. Using a web framework is no different, really, than using any other shared library.
As for all the cruft you complain about, when was the last time you used every single bit of functionality provided by a shared library you linked a C application against? Or is it only bad to draw in automagical functions you won't use when the application isn't being compiled? ;)
Oh, get over it. Does this have to happen any time anything developed less than 10 years ago is mentioned on slashdot? Ruby on Rails being the current favourite example. Here is how it goes every time...
Article: "here is a link to an interesting review of (insert technology here)".
Random guru: "That's nothing! I wrote something similar myself 6 years ago using perl/punchcards/blood from my own hand!"
Elitist Java developer: "Hahaha! You amateurs! How does your pathetic toy deal with redundant HA database clusters in a real-time mission-critical enterprise environment with a 5-nines uptime guarantee? Come back when you've grown up!!"
And so on. Personally, I'm a big fan of Ruby on Rails. I'm rather bored of seeing it compared to Java, a language I have never used. I moved to RoR from PHP, and let me tell you, its like a breath of fresh air. Yes, I could develop the exact same websites using PHP, but it involves writing a lot more code. Aren't computers supposed to do mundane work for us? Why make life difficult for yourself - I'm interested in results, not in worrying about whether I've escaped my SQL queries correctly using some function I had to write myself because PHP can't even do that properly.
Bottom line - RoR means better sites with less work. And that means more time to concentrate on making sites better for users, which is really what its all about.
I'm not sure I get your neutral tone in that document. Even though the Unicode standard has certain minor flaws and is not entirely perfect for Japanese needs, do you really believe the arguments put forth by the Japanese nationalists at all justify the total rejection of Unicode in favor of some incompatible local standard? To me this seems a very clear case of politics getting in the way of sound technical decisions.