Well, I am not sure from where you are pulling these quotes, but I would agree that they are are somewhat exagerated.
The last one directly from the Rails website!
Certainly there are specific solutions that require something more robust than RoR. That said, if 90% of all web applications are things like web forums and blogs (and I believe this is the case), perhaps the claims are not too far off.
I doubt this. There are well-known examples where forums based on PHP (which may not be as elegant as RoR, but is likely to be as fast) has scaling problems.
Besides, it isn't like they try to hide the fact that Rails restricts ones development. I mean, it is called Ruby on Rails. What do rails do? They restrict the range of movement to facilitate more efficient movement in a specific direction.
Rails is a deliberate pun on 'Struts' - a well-known Java framework, which has been used to produce large applications for years. This is a further sign of the arrogance of the Rails developers.
I don't know about RoR replacing Java, but I sure hope it eats up a good share of PHP's dominance.
I think this is where it will succeed, although I suspect PHP will adapt to meet the competition.
I guess the question is, have you actually tried RoR?
Yes.
I've done some Java work and I find it unnecessarily complex for most things. Granted, I haven't tried all the frameworks to find that "suite spot," but frankly, I don't hvae the time. I am not a full time software developer.
There are certainly complex Java frameworks, but there are also lightweight ones. I find JSF very simple and quick to develop with.
How has Microsoft set computing back? The fundamental problem with this argument is that there is NO evidence that there were other more advanced technologies that didn't advance because of Microsoft.
There is plenty of evidence of this. There were far better GUI systems that Windows when it started (anyone who tried to program under Windows 1.0/2.0 as against a more rational system like GEM would have realised this). Even as Windows as developing, it was intended to move to a more stable and secure system (OS/2). Microsoft abandoned that effort, and moved us back to buggy Windows 3.0. There were plenty of ways Microsoft could have given a robust and usable system on the desktop, but they were still shipping (carefully hidden) DOS-based systems (Win95/98) until the late 90s!
Combine this with their proven abuses of monopoly in an attempt to supress competitors, and there is no question Microsoft has held things back.
Rails is innovative in the sense that it is a good balance between PHP and Java. And that is all it is meant to be.
I have heard it called 'the future of web development', and 'a replacement for Java in almost all web applications'. Even the Rails website contains what I consider to be 'less that accurate statements', such as "Rails is all about infrastructure so it's a great fit for practically any type of web application".
I would love to see a pure Ruby-based application try and cope with some of the processor-intensive things I have had to deal with in some web applications. "A great fit for practically any type of web application" is simply false, and it is this kind of overblown propaganda that puts me off Rails.
I know I wouldn't 'want to use Java to solve the (relatively small) problems where I've used Rails... for the exact oppose reason I wouldn't want to use PHP. PHP is brain dead and Java is too complicated and verbose. Does Tapestry address this? I don't know. I've heard mixed reviews.
I don't know - I use another framework - JSF. Combined with Spring and good ORM (JDO) it is very easy to get things up and running for even the smallest websites. Better still, you know your website has the performance to cope with whatever you throw at it in terms of load or future complexity. I have heard good things about Tapestry.
However, more I have done programming and web pages, more I think simplicity is best. More there are layers and neat tricks, more there is confusion and something that you have to debug.
Not really. There can be nothing as confusing as dozens of JSP/PHP pages with lots of repeated code and no central map of how the navigation is done.
If you need the ability to persist data to Text files instead of SQL without changing a single line of code, and you don't want to contribute patches to the Rails project or create your own wrapper, then yeah, AR probably isn't what you want.
Most people don't need that capability though.
You may be surprised. How about giving software the ability to provide backup files or an export facility?
But anyway, since when has supposedly innovative software being about sticking with the mainstream?
TFA addresses both of those - it theorizes that this life is common in interstellar space, and is all fairly similar
There is no justification for this - why should it be similar? Remember we are talking about not 'fairly similar' life on Earth, but virtually the same genetic systems for all life.
Also, it argues that as spore-like forms, they could survive extremely long periods of cold, as they have no metabolic function.
This doesn't matter, as they would still be subject to serious radiation damage over the long periods of time we are talking about. Many bacteria can survive intense radiation, but they need an active metabolism for repair systems to function.
Again, you have to give some evidence or anecdotes here.. I was around then, and some of the ideas were good and have been forgotten, others were bad and are being repeated today....
I have been programming since the 70s. I remember in great debate between dynamic languages and statically types languages in the 80s (it was Smalltalk vs C++ in those days).
I always learned that the best programmers "write programs that write programs".. you don't agree?
I strongly disagree. This can lead to 'clever tricks' code that is obscure and can only be understood by a specialist. For me the key thing is clarity, even at the expense of verbosity.
I think I differ from you in that I expect that a significant number of developers will always be novice and inexperienced.....
You pressume that SQL database IO is all Rails is capable of doing. In fact, I am working on a Rails project which uses SOAP, LDAP, and SQL.
SQL database IO is all that the Rails ActiveRecord ORM is capable of doing 'as shipped'. You may be able to write (or find) wrappers for ActiveRecord to deal with other methods, but that is not the point. A good framework should provide all this for you.
When I use Java I use the JDO 2.0 persistence API. I can read and write objects to SQL-based relational stores, XML, CVS, Text files, LDAP and many other stores without changing a single line of my source code. I also have a rich query language (JDOQL) that I can use on any of these persistence mechanisms - even Text files! Why should I go backwards to Rails/ActiveRecord, which provide less than this?
but when you want to do something more advanced like variable number of input fields... you have to fight it and create workarounds. I really prefer something more low-level as PHP.
No need to leave Java to do this - JSP has the same capabilities.
And what is wrong with a "database browser" web application? If you have a perfectly good database model that you want people to interact with, why not use a database oriented framework? Why should anyone have to reinvent a framework every time they want to write a database driven web application? I'll tell you what, going from brain dead PHP to Rails was a huge boost in productivity.
Because when you get above a certain size and complexity of application you soon realise that a web application can end up as a lot more that just a database-driven application. You may wish to persist data to a very wide range of forms - CVS or XML for backup, or to SOAP services, or even to a variety of different databases and stores. Having your data model defined within one database schema is extremely restrictive.
* 117 lines of very liberally spaced Python code, or
* 138 lines of insecure PHP code, or
* 3004 lines of Java code in 45 files, 29 lines of SQL, and 246 lines of XML configuration in five files.
Which is complete nonsense, as with Java you can use JSP tag libraries, which will are secure (compiled, so no code injection at run-time) and can be used in exactly the same way as PHP, so will require about the same size of code.
...domain specific languages, duck-typing, or any of the other things that make rails really productive...
What the Rails crowd seem to forget is that the issue of whether domain specific languages and duck typing really lead to long-term productivity has been a matter of hot debate for decades. It is all to easy to state that they are productive as is this was some established and universally acknowleged fact. It isn't. They certainly happen to be fashionable at the moment, as they were 20 years ago.
"No, it is because systems like Squeak, no matter how technically wonderful it is (and it is!) is not a production-ready system for high volume websites."
Well Squeak may be, but since Smalltalk is Smaltalk. Dolphin Smalltalk is commercial grade software used...commercially. The problem is more marketing and mindshare than any technical deficiencies.
Dolphin Smalltalk runs only on Windows. There are high-quality cross-platform Smalltalk versions, but the really good ones (such as VisualWorks), are either expensive of have very awkward licensing.
Smalltalk would be a great development system if there was a high-performance cross-platform version that was free or open source.
Why other frameworks like Seaside http://www.seaside.st/ doesn't receive the attention of Slashdot? Seaside is technically superior, it uses continuations to mantain state and this make it really transparent... Maybe because Seaside runs in Squeak http://www.squeak.org/, is open source and... Wait is not sponsored by any big name (like IBM, or Sun)... mmm both IBM and Sun publishes its ads in slashdot... Ahhh now I see why
No, it is because systems like Squeak, no matter how technically wonderful it is (and it is!) is not a production-ready system for high volume websites.
If you want to use continuations (which are surely the future of web development), there are Java frameworks that allow you to do this - WebWork is a good example.
I realized long ago that frameworks were a waste of time, I'd already authored several by then. The last framework I wrote generated static html and now we just edit these pages by hand or write simple shell scripts. The solution is definately more involved than the problem.
Not necessarily. The right framework can produce the HTML for you, and can save you a lot of time because you can use components that generate things like fully-tested portable JavaScript. Some frameworks allow a lot of re-use. JavaServer Faces (JSF) will allow the possibility of rendering HTML, XML, WML or a range of other client presentation technologies from the same tags.
The solution may only be more involved that the problem is simple, and it is hard to tell when a problem will grow to be complex. Using a framework can not only save time but can be a form of insurance against future growth in complexity of the website.
If the red rain particles are biological cells and are of cometary origin, then this phenomena can be a case of panspermia where comets can breed microorgranisms in their radiogenically heated interiors and can act as vehicles for spreading life in the universe.
The problems with this idea are many. The first is that there is no evidence that life on Earth has more than one origin - all life here is based on the same chemicals and same genetic code. If panspermia was true we might expect more variety. The second problem is that although comets have have been heated by radioactive decay around the time of the origin of the solar system, this heating would not have lasted long. It is unlikely that life could have survived frozen for billions of years.
And, of course, he is married to that great 80s singer and actress Toyah Willcox. One of her hits could be used to accompany the Vista Blue Screen of Death..
The only people I am criticizing are people who take Burkhard Heim's theory too credulously, without proof.
But this happens in all physics; well-established theories like General Relativity are played about with so you end up with unphysical things like 'singularities' (which are a sign that the theory is wrong, not the universe - I actually heard a respected physicist state many years ago that a naked singularity would be where the laws of physics broke down so 'literally anything could happen'). We have all sorts of wild things predicted from String Theory these days, without even the slightest idea that String Theory is true or could even realistically ever be proven.
when i put a metafile on the clipboard and call Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().g etAvailableDataFlavors(); it seems all i get it offered is a java.awt.image (which iirc represents a bitmap).
You are right, obviously! If I find a way to get around this I will post here.
There is no theory of gravity or electro-magnetism that ties these things together. If there were such a theory, it would be huge news indeed.
Indeed, and if there was any sort of relationship between electro-magnetism and gravity we would almost certainly have seen it in the behaviour of neutron stars, where both are phenomenally strong, yet can be explained by conventional theories.
i was under the impression that getsystemclipboard only worked for formats the jvm supported natively. is there a way to get the raw wmf data from the windows clipboard through it?
This is an interesting problem! I will see if I can post a solution soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I am not sure from where you are pulling these quotes, but I would agree that they are are somewhat exagerated.
The last one directly from the Rails website!
Certainly there are specific solutions that require something more robust than RoR. That said, if 90% of all web applications are things like web forums and blogs (and I believe this is the case), perhaps the claims are not too far off.
I doubt this. There are well-known examples where forums based on PHP (which may not be as elegant as RoR, but is likely to be as fast) has scaling problems.
Besides, it isn't like they try to hide the fact that Rails restricts ones development. I mean, it is called Ruby on Rails. What do rails do? They restrict the range of movement to facilitate more efficient movement in a specific direction.
Rails is a deliberate pun on 'Struts' - a well-known Java framework, which has been used to produce large applications for years. This is a further sign of the arrogance of the Rails developers.
I don't know about RoR replacing Java, but I sure hope it eats up a good share of PHP's dominance.
I think this is where it will succeed, although I suspect PHP will adapt to meet the competition.
I guess the question is, have you actually tried RoR?
Yes.
I've done some Java work and I find it unnecessarily complex for most things. Granted, I haven't tried all the frameworks to find that "suite spot," but frankly, I don't hvae the time. I am not a full time software developer.
There are certainly complex Java frameworks, but there are also lightweight ones. I find JSF very simple and quick to develop with.
How has Microsoft set computing back? The fundamental problem with this argument is that there is NO evidence that there were other more advanced technologies that didn't advance because of Microsoft.
There is plenty of evidence of this. There were far better GUI systems that Windows when it started (anyone who tried to program under Windows 1.0/2.0 as against a more rational system like GEM would have realised this). Even as Windows as developing, it was intended to move to a more stable and secure system (OS/2). Microsoft abandoned that effort, and moved us back to buggy Windows 3.0. There were plenty of ways Microsoft could have given a robust and usable system on the desktop, but they were still shipping (carefully hidden) DOS-based systems (Win95/98) until the late 90s!
Combine this with their proven abuses of monopoly in an attempt to supress competitors, and there is no question Microsoft has held things back.
Rails is innovative in the sense that it is a good balance between PHP and Java. And that is all it is meant to be.
I have heard it called 'the future of web development', and 'a replacement for Java in almost all web applications'. Even the Rails website contains what I consider to be 'less that accurate statements', such as "Rails is all about infrastructure so it's a great fit for practically any type of web application".
I would love to see a pure Ruby-based application try and cope with some of the processor-intensive things I have had to deal with in some web applications. "A great fit for practically any type of web application" is simply false, and it is this kind of overblown propaganda that puts me off Rails.
I know I wouldn't 'want to use Java to solve the (relatively small) problems where I've used Rails... for the exact oppose reason I wouldn't want to use PHP. PHP is brain dead and Java is too complicated and verbose. Does Tapestry address this? I don't know. I've heard mixed reviews.
I don't know - I use another framework - JSF. Combined with Spring and good ORM (JDO) it is very easy to get things up and running for even the smallest websites. Better still, you know your website has the performance to cope with whatever you throw at it in terms of load or future complexity. I have heard good things about Tapestry.
"Why should I go backwards to Rails/ActiveRecord, which provide less than this?"
Where did I suggest that you should?
Sorry - it was not directed at you - just generally at the Rails enthusiasts who consider the framework to be innovative.
However, more I have done programming and web pages, more I think simplicity is best. More there are layers and neat tricks, more there is confusion and something that you have to debug.
Not really. There can be nothing as confusing as dozens of JSP/PHP pages with lots of repeated code and no central map of how the navigation is done.
Often structure gives clarity.
If you need the ability to persist data to Text files instead of SQL without changing a single line of code, and you don't want to contribute patches to the Rails project or create your own wrapper, then yeah, AR probably isn't what you want.
Most people don't need that capability though.
You may be surprised. How about giving software the ability to provide backup files or an export facility?
But anyway, since when has supposedly innovative software being about sticking with the mainstream?
TFA addresses both of those - it theorizes that this life is common in interstellar space, and is all fairly similar
There is no justification for this - why should it be similar? Remember we are talking about not 'fairly similar' life on Earth, but virtually the same genetic systems for all life.
Also, it argues that as spore-like forms, they could survive extremely long periods of cold, as they have no metabolic function.
This doesn't matter, as they would still be subject to serious radiation damage over the long periods of time we are talking about. Many bacteria can survive intense radiation, but they need an active metabolism for repair systems to function.
Again, you have to give some evidence or anecdotes here.. I was around then, and some of the ideas were good and have been forgotten, others were bad and are being repeated today....
I have been programming since the 70s. I remember in great debate between dynamic languages and statically types languages in the 80s (it was Smalltalk vs C++ in those days).
I always learned that the best programmers "write programs that write programs".. you don't agree?
I strongly disagree. This can lead to 'clever tricks' code that is obscure and can only be understood by a specialist. For me the key thing is clarity, even at the expense of verbosity.
I think I differ from you in that I expect that a significant number of developers will always be novice and inexperienced.....
You pressume that SQL database IO is all Rails is capable of doing. In fact, I am working on a Rails project which uses SOAP, LDAP, and SQL.
SQL database IO is all that the Rails ActiveRecord ORM is capable of doing 'as shipped'. You may be able to write (or find) wrappers for ActiveRecord to deal with other methods, but that is not the point. A good framework should provide all this for you.
When I use Java I use the JDO 2.0 persistence API. I can read and write objects to SQL-based relational stores, XML, CVS, Text files, LDAP and many other stores without changing a single line of my source code. I also have a rich query language (JDOQL) that I can use on any of these persistence mechanisms - even Text files! Why should I go backwards to Rails/ActiveRecord, which provide less than this?
but when you want to do something more advanced like variable number of input fields... you have to fight it and create workarounds. I really prefer something more low-level as PHP.
No need to leave Java to do this - JSP has the same capabilities.
And what is wrong with a "database browser" web application? If you have a perfectly good database model that you want people to interact with, why not use a database oriented framework? Why should anyone have to reinvent a framework every time they want to write a database driven web application? I'll tell you what, going from brain dead PHP to Rails was a huge boost in productivity.
Because when you get above a certain size and complexity of application you soon realise that a web application can end up as a lot more that just a database-driven application. You may wish to persist data to a very wide range of forms - CVS or XML for backup, or to SOAP services, or even to a variety of different databases and stores. Having your data model defined within one database schema is extremely restrictive.
* 117 lines of very liberally spaced Python code, or
* 138 lines of insecure PHP code, or
* 3004 lines of Java code in 45 files, 29 lines of SQL, and 246 lines of XML configuration in five files.
Which is complete nonsense, as with Java you can use JSP tag libraries, which will are secure (compiled, so no code injection at run-time) and can be used in exactly the same way as PHP, so will require about the same size of code.
...domain specific languages, duck-typing, or any of the other things that make rails really productive...
What the Rails crowd seem to forget is that the issue of whether domain specific languages and duck typing really lead to long-term productivity has been a matter of hot debate for decades. It is all to easy to state that they are productive as is this was some established and universally acknowleged fact. It isn't. They certainly happen to be fashionable at the moment, as they were 20 years ago.
"No, it is because systems like Squeak, no matter how technically wonderful it is (and it is!) is not a production-ready system for high volume websites."
Well Squeak may be, but since Smalltalk is Smaltalk. Dolphin Smalltalk is commercial grade software used...commercially. The problem is more marketing and mindshare than any technical deficiencies.
Dolphin Smalltalk runs only on Windows. There are high-quality cross-platform Smalltalk versions, but the really good ones (such as VisualWorks), are either expensive of have very awkward licensing.
Smalltalk would be a great development system if there was a high-performance cross-platform version that was free or open source.
Why other frameworks like Seaside http://www.seaside.st/ doesn't receive the attention of Slashdot?
Seaside is technically superior, it uses continuations to mantain state and this make it really transparent...
Maybe because Seaside runs in Squeak http://www.squeak.org/, is open source and...
Wait is not sponsored by any big name (like IBM, or Sun)... mmm both IBM and Sun publishes its ads in slashdot...
Ahhh now I see why
No, it is because systems like Squeak, no matter how technically wonderful it is (and it is!) is not a production-ready system for high volume websites.
If you want to use continuations (which are surely the future of web development), there are Java frameworks that allow you to do this - WebWork is a good example.
I realized long ago that frameworks were a waste of time, I'd already authored several by then. The last framework I wrote generated static html and now we just edit these pages by hand or write simple shell scripts. The solution is definately more involved than the problem.
Not necessarily. The right framework can produce the HTML for you, and can save you a lot of time because you can use components that generate things like fully-tested portable JavaScript. Some frameworks allow a lot of re-use. JavaServer Faces (JSF) will allow the possibility of rendering HTML, XML, WML or a range of other client presentation technologies from the same tags.
The solution may only be more involved that the problem is simple, and it is hard to tell when a problem will grow to be complex. Using a framework can not only save time but can be a form of insurance against future growth in complexity of the website.
If the red rain particles are biological cells and are of cometary origin, then this phenomena can be a case of panspermia where comets can breed microorgranisms in their radiogenically heated interiors and can act as vehicles for spreading life in the universe.
The problems with this idea are many. The first is that there is no evidence that life on Earth has more than one origin - all life here is based on the same chemicals and same genetic code. If panspermia was true we might expect more variety. The second problem is that although comets have have been heated by radioactive decay around the time of the origin of the solar system, this heating would not have lasted long. It is unlikely that life could have survived frozen for billions of years.
And, of course, he is married to that great 80s singer and actress Toyah Willcox. One of her hits could be used to accompany the Vista Blue Screen of Death..
"It's a Mystery...."
Liar! It's much more complicated than that. It's 'click on the update menu item, type the root password, click install all, and wait'.
Hah! Got you there! Not if you are already root!
The only people I am criticizing are people who take Burkhard Heim's theory too credulously, without proof.
But this happens in all physics; well-established theories like General Relativity are played about with so you end up with unphysical things like 'singularities' (which are a sign that the theory is wrong, not the universe - I actually heard a respected physicist state many years ago that a naked singularity would be where the laws of physics broke down so 'literally anything could happen'). We have all sorts of wild things predicted from String Theory these days, without even the slightest idea that String Theory is true or could even realistically ever be proven.
I guess it is too much fun too resist.
Kaluza-Klein is a failed theory of physics.
:)
Not quite. Surely String Theory is a higher-dimensional version of Kaluza-Klein?
It's probably fine math, but there's utterly no evidence for it. I don't know if it predicts or allows things that are demonstrably false.
Well, I would agree, as this also describes String Theory
when i put a metafile on the clipboard and call Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().g etAvailableDataFlavors(); it seems all i get it offered is a java.awt.image (which iirc represents a bitmap).
You are right, obviously! If I find a way to get around this I will post here.
There is no theory of gravity or electro-magnetism that ties these things together. If there were such a theory, it would be huge news indeed.
Indeed, and if there was any sort of relationship between electro-magnetism and gravity we would almost certainly have seen it in the behaviour of neutron stars, where both are phenomenally strong, yet can be explained by conventional theories.
You're right! That's because nobody could figure out how to patch their machines int he first place!
.... 'click on the update icon and wait'...
Er - have you used a mainstream linux desktop distro recently? It is like
i was under the impression that getsystemclipboard only worked for formats the jvm supported natively. is there a way to get the raw wmf data from the windows clipboard through it?
This is an interesting problem! I will see if I can post a solution soon.