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

Renew joy?

[Dr. Photo]

I code web apps in rails for work. I come home and play in Django. There is my renewed joy...

Re:Improved multi-byte support?

[jrumney]

If you'd RTFA instead of rushing to get first post, you would have seen this:

So since Ruby won't be multibyte-aware until this time next year, Rails 1.2 introduces ActiveSupport::Multibyte for working with Unicode strings. Call the chars method on your string to start working with characters instead of bytes.

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:No Mongrel

[dam.capsule.org]

Maybe you can have a look at JRuby: http://jruby.codehaus.org/.

They aim for 100% Rails compatibility (I think they are nearly there) and there are developments to allow deployment of your rails application using Java's war web archive system to a Java application server.

Comparision between Rails and Django

[Anonymous Coward]

http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_django

Whew

[tcopeland]

It's getting installed at a furious rate... we're doing around a gem a second now.

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[BlackPignouf]

I really didn't understand either before I decided to invest some time and try tutorials.
It's already been 15 years I've been programming (Logo :), Basic, C++, Fortran, Caml, Java, Ruby ...) and I now have the impression that I never really understood programming before having known rails.
So please, try it at least 2 hours, and you'll be amazed by how fun, efficient and beautiful it is.

Everytime I heard someone talking about REST, migrations, rake, capistrano, scaffolding, ActiveRecord, AJAX, routes & nice URL's, I just thought "Whatever! Those are just buzz/hype words without any meaning, and it won't change my programming life".
But it sure did, and I think noone can ever understand it before giving it a fair chance.

Thanks a lot DHH and keep up the good work!

PS: You might want to check http://backpackit.com/ if you look for a "real-world functionality".

Re:I never quite understood the benefit of Rails

[partenon]

And after looking at some presentations on their site, I still don't. Some time ago, I was presented to Rails by a friend. I was skeptical at first, but after watching the video, I realize it is a powerful tool. Then, Rails was /.ed by the first time. And the second. And so on. And people still think Rails is only for "database input/output without customization". Can't they see the power behind it?? Something that was so clear to me at very first sight can't be that difficult for others to see. My only explanation to it is that people is afraid of change. And no technology can change that.

While it is very simple to build applications via scaffold (automatic screens base on database schema), it is only *one* feature in Rails. Try it for a week. *Then* you'll see the real power of Rails. Sustainable development speed*, a very nice language (Ruby), nice documentation (it could be better, but it is ok) and so on.

seems that the way it handles databases is exactly what DBA's hate to see DBA's may hate the way Rails uses databases. The framework isn't focused on "computer ease of computing", but on "developer ease of developing". So, it may not fit for a huge company, w/ hundreds of offshore developers, SA's and DBA's. It is specially useful for small companies/teams, where speed of innovation is their key to get into the market. Example: to start building Rails applications, one just needs to download the ruby interpreter (port install ruby), rubygems (port install rb-rubygems), install rails (gem install rails), and start the application (rails MyApplication). Try that :-)

I also wonder about the performance and memory profile Its footprint on memory isn't any bigger than a similar application developed in Java. Have you ever looked how much memory the app itself + application server uses? And as for performance, it is ok. This is an old discussion, and rails folks usually says it is better to develop an app in 2 months than 12. And the money for the other 10 months can be used to buy more servers, if needed (but I can tell you that you can handle 4GB of transfer/day in a serverpronto.com entry level machine... warning: it is not a benchmark, just an idea).

All it seems to do is offer a way to do very similar and simplistic web apps without any real-world functionality. I really hope you aren't serious or you just don't want to open your eyes... Should I send you some examples of sites built using Rails?

So, instead of seeing the presentations, try to put your hands on it w/ rose-colored glasses** . If you don't like it, at least you'll learn new way to do things, which can help you in your next project ;-)

* try to keep a sustainable development speed w/ one of the standards in the market: struts/spring + hibernate. It is almost impossible to achieve.
** sorry, I'm not a native english speaker... I hope it was used in the right context :-)

Re:Improved multi-byte support?

[dwerg]

Thanks for the vote of confidence. You might be surprised to know that we thought about all this before we started working on AR:Multibyte.

AR:Multibyte is currently mostly used internally in Rails to make methods multibyte safe. It will be really easy to phase it out when internal support arrives.

Ruby is getting more multibyte support 'in a year', which means that it's at least going to take a few years for everyone to actually get the new version in their OS.

Re:Improved multi-byte support?

[aldheorte]

If I remember correctly, there is a cultural issue here in that Unicode is apparently considered with some disdain in Japan and local multi-byte encodings are used, one of which Ruby supports. If you do some searches, you can probably find the full background story.

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).

Re:Improved multi-byte support?

[iluvcapra]

There was a good AC post about it in the "Ruby as a Lisp" posting a few days ago:

It basically has to do with the fact that Unicode uses Han Unification to cause Chinese and Japanese ideograms to share codepoints, and Japanese aren't down with that, so they use Shift-JIS. Check the postings that reply to it for a big digression on the issue ;)

Ruby Rails goodness

[MarkWatson]

Thanks to the Rails developers!

Ruby on Rails is certainly a giant step forward in increasing programmer productivity. The new REST support is great, but I must say that the web based SOAP debugging interface made using SOAP with Rails painless.

A little off topic, but for my customer I integrate Rails with back end Common Lisp code - so far just using home grown REST support at both ends. Eventually, I would like to get the time to generate compiled Lisp libraries directly linked to Ruby when everything is runnng on a single server.

BTW, I created a simply Ruby and Ruby Rails news clipping web site, mostly for my own use, but it might be useful for you: http://rubyplanet.net/