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

Re:Uhhh....

[Ziviyr]

I guess the answer for that is "works great on IE!"

Rails rocks (but isn't a silver bullet)

[PetriWessman]

I've been playing around with Rails and AR quite a bit lately, and it has changed the way I think about programming in many (positive) ways. I come from a heavy Java / J2EE background (do that for a living, serverside systems), and Ruby + Rails is a breath of fresh air. Ruby is simply a wonderful language, there is something very "zen" about it, and Rails is inspired. Sure, it builds on a lot of old concepts, but the brilliance is where it leverages the power of the Ruby language to do things in very efficient and nice ways.

Yes, there is a lot of "black automagic" involved in Rails. It's where the power is, and you can override pretty much everything is you want to. If you're uncomfortable with magic stuff happening behind the scenes and don't want to learn Ruby so you really understand that magic, Rails might not be for you.

I'd claim that pretty much every serious programmer (VB scripters don't count :) should learn Ruby, at least the basics. It might not become your new favorite language (like it has for me), but it will give you a fresh new perspective on how to code stuff.

Ruby does have a few downsides:

• There is no Unicode support. For a language coming from Japan that's surprising (and sucks). I'm given to understand that fixing this is in the roadmap for Ruby(?).
• It's an interpreted language (like Perl, Python etc), so if speed really is an issue for you then it's not a good choice (for most things nowadays, Ruby is more than fast enough)
• The scoping of variables in blocks is a bit funky.
• Some of the organization in the standard libraries is a bit weird, and there is some repetition of functionality. I think this is due to historical reasons (std lib code has evolved over the years)

(there are probably more, but I'm still only learning the language)

As for Rails, well, again there are downsides. Nothing is perfect.

• No Unicode support (inherits Ruby weakness). For web apps, this really sucks.
• Poor localization support in general (again, sucks).
• ActiveRecord is nice, but works best for from-the-ground-up projects. Integrating with a legacy schema might get ugly, a mapping layer (like Java's Hibernate) would work better there.
• No support for clustering and other heavy-lifting technologies. If you're building a seriously big app, Rails might not be the optimal choice. But face it, 99% of web apps don't need stuff like that. Right tool for the job, and all that
• Still a young framework, and evolving. This is both good and bad. Bad, since the framework is changing while you code. Good, since it means that bugs (and maybe the above weaknesses, too) are getting fixed.

So: it's not a silver bullet. Nothing is. But for a large majority of the modern-day web app use cases, it's very nice, productive and, well, elegant. It lets you to do quick prototypes and keep your code clean, you don't end up with the insecure and ugly mess most PHP apps end up being.