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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."
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top -ruby-on-rails-tutorials
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
First, despite what some people say, I think you really have to learn the Ruby language first. Yes, you can get by coding 'by rote' but a deep understanding of this really elegant language will help a lot. Second, there are some great tutorials at the Ruby on Rails site but I think the best is the Agile Web Development with Rails book, though it hasn't yet been updated with the new Rails 1.1 features.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
This is a good place to start: http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ and then perhaps this: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/ (Either one is good -- I used the latter)
Or, if you're on the lazy side of things, you can try it right within your browser here: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
I hope this helps.
Any other former Java programmers relate?
Along with the API documentation, I found the book "Agile Web Development with Rails" highly beneficial. For a while there, it was the only definitive, concise source of Rails examples.
Even if you're skeptical of the Rails hype, I encourage any developer worth their salt to sit down with it for a weekend. The whole concept of convention over configuration can be a bit mind bending, especially if you're use to Java's XML hell. It's always beneficial to force your brain to adapt to new languages; it encourage contrarian thinking when considering new solutions.
Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ -- Exercise for Web 2.0.
Ever heard of using the Trusted Sites list in Internet Explorer? seems to work for me for per-site permissions.
And images expose you to things like the WMF exploit, so let's just go back to the 1980s of web design.
http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html Found that link on the ruby on rails site and it was the best description for a non techie like me that I could find in fast.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
The noscript firefox extension lets you forbid execution of javascript/java/flash by default and only enable it again for some sites (whitelist). Internet Explorer has "Trusted Sites" or something.. So all in all that is not that much of a problem..
while (!asleep()) sheep++
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.
There are tools for making Ruby into self-extracting executables --> http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.ht ml. But for a true compiled solution that will likely be bundled with Ruby 2.0. It should include a VM --> http://www.atdot.net/yarv/. As for GUI apps there are extension libraries for Tk, Qt, Fox, WxWindows, GTK, etc.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of web-apps are actually in-house apps that have a fairly small number of concurrent users.
Sadly, thousands of dev groups all over the world are slaving away very hard at j2ee simply because, well, its a good thing to have on one's resume or because consultants can bill mega-hours by building a "scalable enterprise application".
If people were honest about their motivations and real scalability requirements, it would be clear that j2ee fits a niche market and that more rapid, easier-to-use dev frameworks like RoR fill mainstream needs.
I'm still waiting for C# on Cinderblocks.
Except he got more than a few things wrong. To pick one example, he seems to be under the impression that Django doesn't support i18n/l10n when, in fact, we ship all the core Django applications with support for twenty-odd languages, and Django uses an extensible gettext-based system to make it easy to translate third-party apps and add new languages. We even include an i18n JavaScript library to make translation strings available to JS code. Our admin app even has a setting that chooses which language to render a page with based on the incoming Accept-Language header.
Moral of the story: nice video, but the guy hasn't necessarily done his homework.
Who's using Rails? Check out the Rails wiki site for hundreds of example sites
And if you want a free cPanel/SSH account to download the new Rails version in to see what the craziness is all about - check out www.HostingRails.com
I think its safe to say that Ruby on Rails is the fastest growing Web 2.0-friendly framework - and for good reason. I mean c'mon - the average developer can pick up a few Rails tutorials and have a working demo app (w/ CRUD scaffold action and such) on their local box in a few minutes. Throw in some easily-incorporated Prototype and Scriptaculous effects, and this developer is the new cool kid on the block.
Crazy
~JoeRails