Ruby actually comes with a built-in profiler (likewise for Python). The point? As for any profiler, discovering the bottlenecks of your applications to either change your algorithm (since you create the same functionality in 1/10ths of the time you have the time to refine your algorithms) or recode the bottleneck (and the bottleneck only) in a lower-level language (C or C++)
Duh. Mac systems have always been known to be extremely dodgy as far as rev1 is concerned, which is why veterans whose live doesn't require to immediately upgrade usually wait for rev2 of any hardware Apple produces.
iMacs, iBooks and PowerBooks always suffered high defect rates for rev1s, the difference is that since Apple had much less popularity, there were less switchers and we had fewer internets on the web, it was noticeably less publicized.
Apple's extremely bad record with rev1s is the reason why I'm still waiting before buying a mac. That, and the Core2 being released by the end of the year that seem to literally spank the Core (and AMD chips) perfs-wise.
Based on what you said, there's not THAT much more that RoR does that one has to learn a new language + framework to use over Django.
While it's true, I consider that broadening your horizons and knowing more if only for the sake of widening your field of vision is always a good thing.
Plus neither are Rails nor Django static, they're both under heavy development (likewise for Turbogears, but I don't know that one at all).
after reading the docs etc. it looks like yet another "Ruby on rails is popular, let's make something!" which is nowhere near finished
It's not, both are extremely different from one another (and even more since the Django guys went the magic_removal route). And while Django is not finished (nor is rails) it's very much production ready.
why are there so many drivers? There shouldn't be a need for much more than one for each database - and e.g. in the case of PostgreSQL, that should be the bundled one. pyPgSQL, PyGreSQL, Psycopg, PoPy, Proboscis.... and I'm sure I forgot some. The perl DBI interface was more pleasant to use almost 10 years ago than the python DB interface is today. JDBC also got it right. A de-facto standard python ORM would be nice too.
I hear you, that's probably the biggest issue with the Python community, this "No tool does exactly what I want, so I'll just build a new one, no point in extending an existing one" attitude.
Brings some interresting stuff to the table though (have you tried SQL Alchemy in your Quest For An ORM?)
Another Python issue is that the community can hardly bring itself to standardize things, and even then people usually try to build even more tools (sometimes better though, see py.test versus STL's unittest, or effbot's ElementTree which will finally be part of the STL with Python 2.5 versus the whole xml package crapfest)
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).
IBM has been jumping on multiple bandwagons for a while now, I think I've already seen at least a pair of Rails tutorials and at least one or two Django tutorials on DeveloperWorks.
As an example: I'm trying to get FeedTools going for a week now. There's a gem installation available, but it seems even the developers don't trust it and recommend a manual installation.
Uh? I find pretty much the opposite statement on the front page of the FeedTools project:
However, the preferred method of obtaining FeedTools is with RubyGems because of FeedTools' dependancies on other gems.
Works like a charm too:
$> gem install FeedTools -d -y
Attempting local installation of 'FeedTools'
Local gem file not found: FeedTools*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'FeedTools'
Successfully installed feedtools-0.2.24
Successfully installed uuidtools-1.0.0
Installing RDoc documentation for feedtools-0.2.24...
Installing RDoc documentation for uuidtools-1.0.0...
$> irb --simple-prompt
>> require 'feed_tools'
=> false
>> slashdot_feed = FeedTools::Feed.open('http://www.slashdot.org/inde x.rss')
=> #
>> slashdot_feed.title
=> "Slashdot"
>> slashdot_feed.description
=> "News for nerds, stuff that matters"
>> slashdot_feed.link
=> "http://slashdot.org/"
>> slashdot_feed.items.length
=> 10
Mostly because Smalltalk came from PARC and was built to work in an environment (BTW there is no Smalltalk "IDE", they're environment and you work in an image within the environment, it's a much more impressive concept than the simple concept of IDE which is merely a beefed up text editor)
Ruby was built as a programming language and as a language only, it wasn't built with the idea of environments in mind and the editors/ides therefore have to be bolted on. Plus Ruby only recently started to get widespread adoption in occident (and fyi Python doesn't have many good IDEs and it's been popular for a much longer time in occident than Ruby).
About the packages issue, I can't help but tell you to learn how gems work, as it automagically handles dependencies and package versioning...
While he didn't use it for anything really detrimental, he more than likely could have, especially when you see the bunch of code he managed to cram in.
XSS is *VERY* easy to prevent. Much more so than SQL injection.
Uh? SQL Injection is trivial to prevent, just escape your user-provided content (most languages do it automagically for you if you use prepared statements btw, and by "most languages" I mean to say "just about every language but PHP before mysqli_ and PDO")
XSS, on the other hand, relies as much in your lack of escaping as in browser-specific "features" such as the ability of MSIE to execute arbitrary Javascript code embedded in CSS.
XSS is much harder to prevent than SQL Injection.
Which does not mean that it should ever be classified as "unavoidable" (it's not) or less dangerous than SQLI (it can, in fact, be much worse)
I'd second this post, a forum I lurk on had a major XSS issue a few years ago: flash uploads were allowed and a user found a way for his scripts to call home: he had the ability to embed flash on a page, then every time the flash'd display it'd phone home and send him the login informations/cookies of the user who'd displayed the flash.
Long story short, he gave himself supadmin rights as a proof of concept and then told of the vulnerability to the dev of the forum software.
He could just as well have destroyed the whole forum.
I don't know, we'll have to see, but if it's one lightbulb worth of energy then it's freaking huge, even economy-efficient bulbs don't get much lower than 15W and regular bulbs are above the 40W mark...
It's not about categories, it's about history, the Saturn was running against the PS1 with a few months lead. Just read what happened, it's not that hard: the Saturn was released in Nov' 1994 in Japan. It wa supposed to be released at the end of summer'95 in the US, but Sega came up with a surprise 4-months-early shipping announcement at E3 '95 at a nominal price of $399. At the same E3, Sony's envoy just announced one thing before stepping off of the stage (there was no speech from sony): "$299". The playstation was to be released 5 months later.
The Staturn was discontinued before the DreamCast was even released (angering quite a lot of gamers, by contrast the plug was only pulled this year on the PS' production).
The DreamCast was released in Nov'98 in Japan and September '99 in the USA. In April '99, Sony has started building the hype around it's PS2 in advance and prevention of the DreamCast, touting the PS1 backward compatibility and allegely vastly superior hardware (including the higly-hiped Emotion Engine vaporware). The Dreamcast' vastly superior games (PS2 games didn't start reaching Dreamcast' level before mid-2001, a year or so after the console's initial release) and online abilities didn't manage to get the public's attention against sony's hipe and fud and the PS2' DVD player.
The announcement of the Xbox and the GameCube in 2000 was usually seen as the death mark for the DC, both Microsoft and Nintendo having deep pockets, while sega wasn't seen as having enough cash to keep up with a prolounged marketting campaign.
January 31, 2001, the DreamCast was officially killed by Sega effectively ending Sega's career as a hardware maker (even though it made a comeback in Feb'06 as Sega started selling Dreamcasts again via it's online store).
Like it or not, the Dreamcast is part of the PS2, the Xbox' and the GC' generation.
Fail, the DreamCast came earlier than the other consoles from it's generation, but it was the same generation as the PS2, Xbox and GC (hint: the PS1 killed the Saturn while the full-of-lies announce of the PS2 slaughtered the DreamCast)
Well, they still repeatedly said that the PS3 would more than likely run into the Xbox360' ballpark (>100W) and maybe even beat it at power consumption, and that the Wii was very likely to run much cheaper (they forgot to say that Connect24 was likely to kill the 'idle' power savings though)
Last one I recall is Age of Empires III, it doesn't just say you shouldn't install it on Windows 2000, it actively refuses to be installed on Windows 2000.
(as a result I of course don't play AoE3 and returned my copy to the store)
However XP had some major glaring flaws (mydoom anyone?) and Win2000 worked just fine for anything I needed included games.
Nowadays, quite a lot of stuff actually requires Windows XP though (often from microsoft, and that includes games, but not always). It's always slightly frustrating to see that you can't install a game just because you were artificially blocked out (and don't tell me it's not artificial)
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby actually comes with a built-in profiler (likewise for Python). The point? As for any profiler, discovering the bottlenecks of your applications to either change your algorithm (since you create the same functionality in 1/10ths of the time you have the time to refine your algorithms) or recode the bottleneck (and the bottleneck only) in a lower-level language (C or C++)
Duh. Mac systems have always been known to be extremely dodgy as far as rev1 is concerned, which is why veterans whose live doesn't require to immediately upgrade usually wait for rev2 of any hardware Apple produces.
iMacs, iBooks and PowerBooks always suffered high defect rates for rev1s, the difference is that since Apple had much less popularity, there were less switchers and we had fewer internets on the web, it was noticeably less publicized.
Apple's extremely bad record with rev1s is the reason why I'm still waiting before buying a mac. That, and the Core2 being released by the end of the year that seem to literally spank the Core (and AMD chips) perfs-wise.
The big difference is that Rails is an actual tool, with a of buzz around it, while AJAX is wankery for marketroïds and is only buzz.
While it's true, I consider that broadening your horizons and knowing more if only for the sake of widening your field of vision is always a good thing.
Plus neither are Rails nor Django static, they're both under heavy development (likewise for Turbogears, but I don't know that one at all).
It's not, both are extremely different from one another (and even more since the Django guys went the magic_removal route). And while Django is not finished (nor is rails) it's very much production ready.
I hear you, that's probably the biggest issue with the Python community, this "No tool does exactly what I want, so I'll just build a new one, no point in extending an existing one" attitude.
Brings some interresting stuff to the table though (have you tried SQL Alchemy in your Quest For An ORM?)
Another Python issue is that the community can hardly bring itself to standardize things, and even then people usually try to build even more tools (sometimes better though, see py.test versus STL's unittest, or effbot's ElementTree which will finally be part of the STL with Python 2.5 versus the whole xml package crapfest)
I've tried a bit of both, and from what I've seen:
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).
IBM has been jumping on multiple bandwagons for a while now, I think I've already seen at least a pair of Rails tutorials and at least one or two Django tutorials on DeveloperWorks.
They're usually fairly bad too..
Uh? I find pretty much the opposite statement on the front page of the FeedTools project:
Works like a charm too:
Mostly because Smalltalk came from PARC and was built to work in an environment (BTW there is no Smalltalk "IDE", they're environment and you work in an image within the environment, it's a much more impressive concept than the simple concept of IDE which is merely a beefed up text editor)
Ruby was built as a programming language and as a language only, it wasn't built with the idea of environments in mind and the editors/ides therefore have to be bolted on. Plus Ruby only recently started to get widespread adoption in occident (and fyi Python doesn't have many good IDEs and it's been popular for a much longer time in occident than Ruby).
About the packages issue, I can't help but tell you to learn how gems work, as it automagically handles dependencies and package versioning...
Have you noticed that it's not, in fact, older than mysqli_ or PDO?
you may want to check Samy's hack of Myspace
While he didn't use it for anything really detrimental, he more than likely could have, especially when you see the bunch of code he managed to cram in.
Define "escape all user input properly"
Uh? SQL Injection is trivial to prevent, just escape your user-provided content (most languages do it automagically for you if you use prepared statements btw, and by "most languages" I mean to say "just about every language but PHP before mysqli_ and PDO")
XSS, on the other hand, relies as much in your lack of escaping as in browser-specific "features" such as the ability of MSIE to execute arbitrary Javascript code embedded in CSS.
XSS is much harder to prevent than SQL Injection.
Which does not mean that it should ever be classified as "unavoidable" (it's not) or less dangerous than SQLI (it can, in fact, be much worse)
I'd second this post, a forum I lurk on had a major XSS issue a few years ago: flash uploads were allowed and a user found a way for his scripts to call home: he had the ability to embed flash on a page, then every time the flash'd display it'd phone home and send him the login informations/cookies of the user who'd displayed the flash.
Long story short, he gave himself supadmin rights as a proof of concept and then told of the vulnerability to the dev of the forum software.
He could just as well have destroyed the whole forum.
Yeah because our bodies were obviously 'meant' (as in evolved I guess?) to ... uuuh... sit in chairs all day and manipulate a PS2 controller?
Do you mean that Ballmer with actually buy a Wii to play Elebits?
Is the pain during or after the operation itself? And how long does the pain last (before the 3 days itching)?
Also, what happened during the 3 months post op? any strange (temporary) side-effect or anything?
I don't know, we'll have to see, but if it's one lightbulb worth of energy then it's freaking huge, even economy-efficient bulbs don't get much lower than 15W and regular bulbs are above the 40W mark...
It's not about categories, it's about history, the Saturn was running against the PS1 with a few months lead. Just read what happened, it's not that hard: the Saturn was released in Nov' 1994 in Japan. It wa supposed to be released at the end of summer'95 in the US, but Sega came up with a surprise 4-months-early shipping announcement at E3 '95 at a nominal price of $399. At the same E3, Sony's envoy just announced one thing before stepping off of the stage (there was no speech from sony): "$299". The playstation was to be released 5 months later.
The Staturn was discontinued before the DreamCast was even released (angering quite a lot of gamers, by contrast the plug was only pulled this year on the PS' production).
The DreamCast was released in Nov'98 in Japan and September '99 in the USA. In April '99, Sony has started building the hype around it's PS2 in advance and prevention of the DreamCast, touting the PS1 backward compatibility and allegely vastly superior hardware (including the higly-hiped Emotion Engine vaporware). The Dreamcast' vastly superior games (PS2 games didn't start reaching Dreamcast' level before mid-2001, a year or so after the console's initial release) and online abilities didn't manage to get the public's attention against sony's hipe and fud and the PS2' DVD player.
The announcement of the Xbox and the GameCube in 2000 was usually seen as the death mark for the DC, both Microsoft and Nintendo having deep pockets, while sega wasn't seen as having enough cash to keep up with a prolounged marketting campaign.
January 31, 2001, the DreamCast was officially killed by Sega effectively ending Sega's career as a hardware maker (even though it made a comeback in Feb'06 as Sega started selling Dreamcasts again via it's online store).
Like it or not, the Dreamcast is part of the PS2, the Xbox' and the GC' generation.
Fail, the DreamCast came earlier than the other consoles from it's generation, but it was the same generation as the PS2, Xbox and GC (hint: the PS1 killed the Saturn while the full-of-lies announce of the PS2 slaughtered the DreamCast)
Yeah because the PS2, Xbox and GameCube are obviously not from the same gen...
wait...
Well, they still repeatedly said that the PS3 would more than likely run into the Xbox360' ballpark (>100W) and maybe even beat it at power consumption, and that the Wii was very likely to run much cheaper (they forgot to say that Connect24 was likely to kill the 'idle' power savings though)
Last one I recall is Age of Empires III, it doesn't just say you shouldn't install it on Windows 2000, it actively refuses to be installed on Windows 2000.
(as a result I of course don't play AoE3 and returned my copy to the store)
Nowadays, quite a lot of stuff actually requires Windows XP though (often from microsoft, and that includes games, but not always). It's always slightly frustrating to see that you can't install a game just because you were artificially blocked out (and don't tell me it's not artificial)