Surging Ruby on Rails

[stealth2009]

Ruby on Rails is a web development tool. It has been making some noise lately. I have not used it so I really don't know what makes it special. Have you tried using Ruby on Rails?

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[NanoStuff]

You'd be doing yourself a favor if you at least had a look at it. It's not quite as easy to get started as some people would tell you, primarily because of the tight conventions. Unlike PHP and the like, it's a comprehensively structured framework from the initial generation of the application (yes, you start off with a functional application), so there is a substantial amount of information you have to work into your head as to how the components of the system operate with eachother. Coming from Ruby, there's a number of constructs that seem like they should not work, for example instance variables accessible across multiple files without any apparent inclusions... there's a lot of 'behind the scenes' operations. The good news is that you don't have to know any Ruby whatsoever before you start off with Rails, but it is adviseable that you do learn Ruby if you have any intention of becoming good.

Once you have the potentially disorienting introduction out of the way... and you might have to go over it several times over a span of several days before you finally begin to 'get it', it gets easier, and once you get it, you can roll out solid scalable applications in a matter of hours.

For large projects in particular, Rails has just about everything over PHP. It's natively more secure, it's more 'object-oriented', very good database abstraction and a vast number of constructs that can create forms, amongst other elements, asynchronous communication, sessions and logins with mere keystrokes.

You might notice that content management systems are not very popular with Rails, unlike PHP. That's largely because you can whip up your own in a short period of time, containing exactly what you want with none of the bloat, often with the help of Gems and plugins.

Once the new VM is released, I realistically expect that Ruby will overtake PHP fairly quickly, and with it all other web programming languages short of Java. Largely because of the fact it's the fastest growing programming language on the planet. It only took about 18 months for it to grow from next to nothing to one of the big Top 10. Java will succumb, but it's going to take a bit longer.

 

[hans007]

i have coded a lot of ruby at my last job. not rails, but just normal ruby. ruby is slow. there is no way it will overtake java or C# etc. it is just plain slow.

it also has a lot of really weird issues, not to mention theres no real concept of protected or private members in classes, the documentation / support for it compared to php is much less because the developers are all in japan (you cannot even get a apache mod of it for non linux , etc). php is not a BAD programming language. this isnt cgi-perl vs. ruby type difference. i'll admit ruby has some really niec things going for it, but i really dont think its that huge a leap ahead over php as far as being a scripting language and php has a huge community. i also hate the whole being / end, | | syntax . i suppose i'm mostly a win32/c++ programmer so that structure just annoys me (its a little too vb like, without semicolons or variable syntax like $)

in psuedo programming scripting realm i think it will have a large following, but ruby on rails is jus tthe latest "hot" language. ruby as a language has been aroun d for over a decade and is more or less python with a bunch of ready made libraries. it wont last, once the community moves on to its next "hot" language.

anyhow thats just my impression of it. I am not really a web developer, i've just done some php, asp, ruby, java stuff on the side at my jobs mostly for internal sites and i cant relaly say ruby "blew away" anything. i'd rather work in it than perl thats about it. a lot of people are cheerleading ruby, but if you are gonna learn something learn java. or well learn ruby in 3 days, and then learn java.

 

[manko]

I've been using PHP to create basic addons and customizations for pre-exisiting CMSes, forums and other scripts for a few years.

Now, I've been looking at Ruby on Rails to roll my own original database-driven site with user submitted links, comments, user groups, friends and favorites. I think I could do most of the input, searching and sorting in PHP, but I'm not confident of being able to write a complete and secure user login and management system.

Do you think Ruby on Rails would be a good solution to look at or should I knuckle down and try to write (and find tutorials) to write all the systems from scratch in PHP?

I also came across Django when looking into Ruby on Rails. Any opinions on Django vs. RoR?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[NanoStuff]

Originally posted by: hans007
i have coded a lot of ruby at my last job. not rails, but just normal ruby. ruby is slow. there is no way it will overtake java or C# etc. it is just plain slow.

Incase you didn't look into the VM I mentioned in the last paragraph.

http://www.antoniocangiano.com/articles...point-ruby-net-vs-rubinius-vs-cardinal

Slow today, but not for much longer . You can already play around with the new VM if you log into Ruby's SVN.

As for your other complaints... unjustified. No semicolons, variable declarations? Ruby isn't stopping you from inserting these. If it helps you sleep at night, do it. Keep in mind Ruby does have uses for semicolons and requires class variable declarations, but only requires them when there's a reason for it, you may not be comfortable with smart interpreters.

Originally posted by: hans007
Do you think Ruby on Rails would be a good solution to look at or should I knuckle down and try to write (and find tutorials) to write all the systems from scratch in PHP?

I don't believe there's anything stopping you from doing it in PHP, but with PHP if you want to write 'systems' from scratch, if I understand you correctly, you better know PHP very well. With PHP it's easy to introduce gaping security holes. A lot of good packages exist for both PHP and Ruby/Rails so much of the work may be redundant. Rails avoids most of the low level technicalities and focues on application structure at a high level of abstraction. Nothing is stopping you from fiddling with SQL queries and the like, but you will find it's rarely necessary.

As for Django, I have not used it personally, but it seems a large number of people moved from Django to RoR. Most remaining Django users seem to be Python programmers that don't yet see a reason to switch.

 

[Isaiah]

It doesn't really make sense to compare RoR with PHP, they are two different things. RoR is a programming framework, PHP is a programming language.

You should check out CodeIgniter if you want a PHP framework to develop with, it's a lightweight PHP framework with a great developer community to answer any question you might have about it!
I'm not trying to say RoR is bad, I've used it for a few projects(mostly just to try it out), but you really should check out some PHP frameworks before you make the move to RoR.

 

[manko]

Thanks for your comments, NanoStuff and Isaiah. I've glanced at a few PHP frameworks, but hadn't heard about CodeIgniter. I'll take a look. Thanks for the suggestion.