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Ruby on Rails for DB2 Developers
An anonymous reader writes "Ruby on Rails seems to be the new hotness in the world of web development, right up there with Ajax. IBM DeveloperWorks has a helpful howto on how to bring the worlds of Ruby on Rails and your DB2 framework together. From the article: 'Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment.'"
Many times, I have tried learning it on my own and have been frustrated by missing or conflicting versions of components. I'm waiting for some folks to develop a one install package that will take care of all packages needed to develop serious apps on Ruby. An IDE like Access on the JET database engine would be very welcome.
There is some effort to this end. These folks http://www.railslivecd.org/ have started some work in this direction.
I can understand wanting to get news of the DB2 adapter out to the public... But to attach a tutorial to it that is basically just another RoR tutorial seems pointless. The only differences in this article from every other RoR article were in the paragraph that describes how to install the DB2 adapter for RoR.
-yawn-
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
But to attach a tutorial to it that is basically just another RoR tutorial seems pointless.
It's called "jumping onto the bandwagon"; you may have heard of it. It's what all of IBM's "cutting-edge" developerworks-articles (written by some sophomore pimply FOSS-monkey intern) are about.
Getting the likes of IBM to recognize the usefulness of the Rails framework is a little more than just another DBMS supported: rails used to be bashed, especially by java people, for not being "enterprise ready". They criticised the limitations of the active record ORM (but it's open source, you can either extend it or make your custom sql calls), or the relative immaturity of ruby and libraries.
Now such claims will sound less credible so more dubious people might give it a try.
IBM has been hosting articles about RoR for some time - this is not a major change in attitude - it is indeed simply getting just annother DBMS supported. Rails is bashed for not being enterprise ready for more than just the range of databases supported. This additional support does nothing to change the limitations of the Active Record approach (and the ability to extend the system does not make it enterprise ready).
There are many aspects of Ruby and Rails that remain a significant barrier to much enterprise use - performance, for one thing (Ruby VMs that might address this problem seem stuck in permanent beta), the ability to handle international characters is another.
To assume that these issues are somehow fixed simply because IBM has provided DB2 support is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Massive databases often support multiple presentation layers - ecommerce, internal administration, parter access, internal reporting, etc, etc. Even if you're doing one in Java/websphere there's no reason another couldn't be in RoR.
There is good reason why you may not want it to be. The Java/J2EE/Websphere approach often uses clustering and cacheing to give high performance and scalability. You would not want to let a small RoR application (or any other type of application) loose on such such a system.