ruby on rails any good?
Ok I can't take the hype. I have to try the infamous ruby on rails. http://www.rubyonrails.org/
I managed to pretty much avoid java after I was put off by a buggy servlet server, despite the huge amount of foaming at the mouth enthusiasm oracle inflicted on their customers to embrace it. (You can lead customers to java but you can't make them use it, especially not if you're replacing a higher level language (plsql) with a far lower one (java) :-) I managed to almost completely avoid learning php, unbelievable as that might seem. I never got anywhere near python and have completely avoided .net another thing on Oracle's radar. I've only done the barest minimum with javascript. So I definitely have sales-resistance, staying in the 80's with Perl. But all the promo over ruby is very tempting...
Unfortunately tho, where I could really use a web site overhaul is
on a hosted site that doesn't provide ruby etc. (Cheap commercial web hosts sure know how to make things difficult. If some application
is not provided/installable by fantastico or something like that you
may be SOL because you don't have a lot of leeway in what you can do to run/change things.)
Not a lot of web hosting firms are doing ruby, yet:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts
But anyway at least I can try it out on
one of my work machines as long as what I'm using it for is "in the mission" and we do have reasons to do some things via the web.
So anyone already checked this ruby stuff out? As a legacy pre-object programmer and gasp, pre-ansi C programmer, who was not swept away nor even slightly favorably impressed by the object schtick, will this newfangled view/model/controller thing
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html
totally overwhelm my brain or can I just hack away regardless?
In any case I'll report back as to what I find unless someone beats me to it.
Not ready for prime time
I've not used Ruby but I hear it's a very elegant language. I've looked into it. Basically what I've come up for is if you want a great web site now, go with a PHP solution like Drupal. There may be a CMS built on Ruby in the future (there is one in development with "frog" in the name), but it's not nearly as powerful as say a Drupal site.
I wish I had more time to fool around with Ruby but I don't.
See what this guy says
Here is a Drupal developer who seems to have some objective thoughts on RoR: http://www.webschuur.com/node/381
ruby on rails
My understanding is there is a CMS using ruby now called Typo
not to be confused with other CMS' that start with that word :-(
http://typo.leetsoft.com/trac/
There are themes for it:
http://typogarden.com/articles/2005/12/10/final-results
Also there is something called muraveyweb:
http://doc.muravey.net/
others:
http://railfrog.com/
http://rcms.oopen.de/
And a couple wikis:
http://www.hieraki.org/trac/
http://instiki.org/show/HomePage
Well I did look into the rails thing but I now
I have more concerns about the language ruby than the rails part,
which is the opposite of how I thought this would be. Ruby is plenty
different than perl, a lot more different than I imagined, in very fundamental ways. Like ruby doesn't use an end of statement (eg ;) but
does use a continue statement (\) for multiline statements, it doesn't use braces ({} )around most constructs but rather a something -- end construct (with no "begin") for example( do *stuff* end ) Big changes in the loop constructs; arrays/hashes are totally different. Ruby uses all the characters we're familiar with in perl *in a totally different way*.
It does IMHO bear a certain resemblance to plsql which means I guess it was also influenced by ada. I don't know about other people but I find it easy to get tripped up by the small stuff, tripped up by interference from other programming languages. Eg no matter how many years I have programmed in plsql I still
keep on leaving out the colon in plsql's two character assignment token (:= ) On the other hand I often leave off the $ in front of variables in perl. That will be a plus in ruby, which has ditched the $ variable_name thing. (But interestingly, they *kept* all those special $ variables, which is something that never appealed to me and I would have gotten rid of them if I started over from scratch with a language. Go figure! Ruby has adopted the handling of nullin the spirit of Oracle except null is now called nil. (nil is neither true nor false, it cannot be compared to anything. That is definitely not to my liking. If there was one thing I could change about oracle
it would be its handling of null!
On the other hand they do a very good job of explaining things in the
"pickaxe" ruby book and in the agile development book. I learned things I never knew about Perl from reading the ruby book. In any case I'm still considering rails.