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.'"

Comments

Re:DB2... The only change?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Really good news.

[marcello_dl]

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.

Re:Ruby could be packaged better

[12ahead]

Not sure what system you are on, but for osx there is Locomotive. You will get a magnitude of libraries (I guess the DB2 stuff won't be in there just yet) plus a nice gui to start/stop webservers for your Rails projects. Not sure if you were after Rails or plain Ruby, but anyway.

On the IDE front you could check out RadRails. Again, this focuses on Rails instead of "just" Ruby.
 
However, I do believe that Ruby is one of those languages that you can learn by just using it from command line. You do not need an IDE or huge framework to do fun stuff. You can at least get a feel for how Ruby does stuff to put you off it or to keep investigating.

Re:RoR vs Django?

[masklinn]

I've tried a bit of both, and from what I've seen:

• Rails does more user-related stuff automagically, but doesn't build your administrative interfaces (you have to do that yourself). Django's admin interfaces are dead-easy to build and gorgeous to boot (as far as admin interfaces can be I mean).
• Rails does a lot of things by itself, but you have to follow the Rails Path/Rails Way/whatever. It's name means it all, if you veer too far from how DHH intended Rails to work it breaks (in the sense of "it makes your life a living hell), while Django is much more flexible. If you don't like the way Rails work you're screwed while with Django you can recover. The plus side is that Rails does a lot of things for you if you follow The Rails Way.
• I quite like the ActiveRecord ORM pattern. On the other hand i'll repeat the last point: if you want to switch to another ORM pattern or ORM period, you're going to have a hard time. Django makes it much easier to switch to a non-default ORM engine (the impressive SQL Alchemy for example)
• Rails' quite static (directories) structure make it... well.. structured. You don't want to bend the directory structure too much (see point 2), but it's usually well thought of and gives a very clean feeling. Django "feels" much less structured out of the box.
• Testing is strongly emphasized in Rails, and it goes a long way towards helping you write as many Unit (for models) and Functional (for controllers) tests as you can write. And every time you generate models or controllers Rails will create test stubs that you just have to fill.
• ERb. Basically, you write your templates (views) in Ruby. This means that Ruby's templates are much more powerful than Django's (out of the box) templates, and you don't have to learn another language and switch between Ruby and your-template-language. On the other hand, Django's templating language makes it much simpler to use by designers (ERb is much more fit to coders, and the Django team considered that coders didn't know jack about web pages and weren't supposed to go near the stuff). The downside of ERb is -- of course -- that since it's much more powerful (you have the full power or Ruby available) you can turn your templates into a PHP-like crapfest with whole bunches of application/model logic in them.

I haven't build any big application with either yet, I don't have any real preference yet (I know more about Rails than Django though), but how I see it ATM is that way: if I need an extremely extensive admin interface, I'll just go with Django, the admin scaffolds just save too much time. If I don't need that extensive admin interfaces I'll go for the most well-known language in the team (if I have Pythonistas I'll pick Django, if I have rubyists I'll go with RoR).