Ruby On Rails 1.2 Released

Scooter[AMMO] writes "David Heinemeier Hansson sent a post to the Rails 1.2. This new version adds a slew of buff and polish to the rest of the system, as well several new features like RESTful interfaces, response formats, improved multi-byte support, and more. If you haven't checked out the web application framework that aims to renew joy within its users, give it a look. You may be amazed at how easy it makes things without sacrificing power or functionality."

Comments

No Mongrel

[Gunark]

It's too bad Rails 1.2 wasn't released with mongrel (a very nice app server designed to run Rails apps, among other things). Currently deploying a production-ready server capable of running Rails is a uncomfortably unrails-like experience. Mongrel makes things a bit nicer, but even with that running under virtual hosts and/or with SSL requires some seriously heavy lifting (think Mongrel running behind Apache acting as a reverse proxy).

Until we get a quick and easy way of deploying Rails apps -- especially at the shared hosting level for ISPs (along the lines of PHP hosting, which is now standard), Rails will continue to have a difficult time finding a niche. The only place where Rails really belongs right now, and the only place where I'm using it (and loving it) is the corporate intranet, where putting up dedicated mongrel servers for internal web-based apps is not an issue.

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[jadavis]

DBA's may hate the way Rails uses databases.

This is true, but it's understandable also. Rails uses databases as persistent object storage, and nothing more.

The benefits of relational databases are that they can enforce constraints with simple declarations, and abstract the logical from the physical storage. You can try to do some basic checking before you put something into a database, but it's very hard to do constraints on the application side.

I understand why developers at smaller companies don't like using relational databases as relational databases. For a long time relational databases weren't really meeting the needs of smaller shops, and they have their own learning curve. But now with good databases like PostgreSQL that have proper constraints and can do powerful relational manipulations, it's a great time to get involved in relational databases. I encourage you to try them out, they can be a godsend when it comes to application development speed.

It's a wonderful thing when you get an error from your database, and you know exactly which part of the application tried to do something wrong. The alternative is waiting until the bad data gets in, and finding out a week later when you try to do a report (try to find the bug now that you have no idea how the data got that way).