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.'"

Comments

In a comparison, Ruby suffers for one big reason

[CRCulver]

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.

language matters a great deal

[idlake]

everyone has their syntax preference, but at the end of the day its the paradigm you apply that matters and not the language.

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 .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.

Re:Anyone else Railed-out?

[JulesLt]

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).

Re:Anyone else Railed-out?

[shmlco]

"Inexperience can mitigate the benefits of any technology..."

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.

Re:Anyone else Railed-out?

[ubernostrum]

I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things. I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.

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)?

So I've done most of the site in PHP instead. Direct, to the point, fast enough (though I'm thinking about a rewrite in C for a pure CGI/FastCGI binary), a minimum of automagic hand-holding - just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more, and then format the output. No wondering how many hundred methods have been created that I don't know about, what happens when a record is deleted/updated (I'll let the database handle null/ignore/cascade thankyou) or whatever else Rails is doing behind my back.

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? ;)

Re:In a comparison, Ruby suffers for one big reaso

[pilkul]

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.