Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
MrByte420 writes "The Ruby On Rails team today released version 1.1 of the web framework. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.' New features were examined back in February at Scottraymond.net and include Javascript/AJAX integration, enhancements to active record, and enhanced testing suites. Not to mention upgrading this time promises to be a piece of cake."
Any other former Java programmers relate?
I'm coding a large-scale site in RoR right now. It'll be deployed across three Lighttpd servers with two MySQL servers. I'm about three weeks into the site and I've probably saved a month of work already over how long it'd take me to do the same work in Java or PHP.
Rails' efficiency won't continue to be that high as I get more into the business logic and smaller details, but for the data layers that I'm doing now Rails blows away anything else. I'll still be at least 50% ahead of where I'd be using Java and PHP when it's finished. The code will be way cleaner because Ruby is a better designed language than either Java or PHP. It'll be a snap to add features later, which is the problem we're currently having with our site and its 20,000+ lines of PHP code.
I've coded and managed Java and PHP sites. PHP is easier to work with than Java for most small to medium sites and Java can be easier on large sites. Neither of them are better than Rails for any size site.
I predict that Ruby on Rails will become the big third competitor in the market for building web apps. Java will still be bigger on the very high end because of EJBs and the need to interface with legacy systems and PHP will still be bigger on the low end because it's easier to learn since you don't need to know OOP to get started. Ruby on Rails will be the language/framework that finally fits into that middle market where most medium to large businesses are. PHP's code is too messy to work there without a lot of coder discipline and either a custom or well-done Open Source framework and Java is just too complicated.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Everyone raves about the poignant guide, but I found that after reading it for 20 minutes, I hadn't done much except read stories and comic strips. I really didn't have much of an appreciation for the language.
There's something to be said for making a potentially dry subject interesting, but it seems to go too far with it and actually spread the actual information too thin.
Just my opinion, of course.