Comments on: Tempted by Rails http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/ Ugo Cei's Weblog Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:52:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: Sylvain Wallez http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-496 Sylvain Wallez Sun, 23 Oct 2005 14:39:15 +0000 http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-496 RoR is certainly cool, now I know that my BigCo customers will never accept it on their servers. Something I've been increasingly hooked to is JavaScript. I learned through Cocoon's flowscript that JavaScript is a "real" language, which has suffered from its use in browsers where people were fighting with DOM implementations rather than the language itself. But since I started digging in Ajax libraries such as Dojo and Scriptaculous, I started to realize how really powerful JS is. Rhino is also a very well thought-out thing, and using more than its basic features to connect to Java code allows for very powerful things. So Rails will certainly influence the way we write web applications and their supporting frameworks, but Ajax gurus and Rhino are likely to make these techniques widespread in the Java world. JavaScript on the client, JavaScript on the server, why would the majority of people want to switch to another language? RoR is certainly cool, now I know that my BigCo customers will never accept it on their servers. Something I’ve been increasingly hooked to is JavaScript.

I learned through Cocoon’s flowscript that JavaScript is a “real” language, which has suffered from its use in browsers where people were fighting with DOM implementations rather than the language itself.

But since I started digging in Ajax libraries such as Dojo and Scriptaculous, I started to realize how really powerful JS is. Rhino is also a very well thought-out thing, and using more than its basic features to connect to Java code allows for very powerful things.

So Rails will certainly influence the way we write web applications and their supporting frameworks, but Ajax gurus and Rhino are likely to make these techniques widespread in the Java world.

JavaScript on the client, JavaScript on the server, why would the majority of people want to switch to another language?

]]> By: Nikolas Coukouma http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-494 Nikolas Coukouma Sat, 22 Oct 2005 15:37:59 +0000 http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-494 For search, you might want to try Ruby/Odeum http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/ruby_odeum/ For search, you might want to try Ruby/Odeum
http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/ruby_odeum/

]]> By: Geert Bevin http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-493 Geert Bevin Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:58:55 +0000 http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-493 I forgot to say that we have native support for RSS and Atom: http://rifers.org/features/content+syndication+framework and we have a sub-project that provides a very easy to use database-backed queue for Lucene indexing: https://svn.rifers.org/rife-search/trunk/ We will integrate this with the core framework for the next version release. I forgot to say that we have native support for RSS and Atom:
http://rifers.org/features/content+syndication+framework

and we have a sub-project that provides a very easy to use database-backed queue for Lucene indexing:
https://svn.rifers.org/rife-search/trunk/

We will integrate this with the core framework for the next version release.

]]> By: Geert Bevin http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-492 Geert Bevin Sat, 22 Oct 2005 14:57:04 +0000 http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-492 Hi Ugo, why don't you try out some of the Java frameworks that have been working hard to simplify j2EE and web development. There has been a strong drive for this for many years, but people somehow don't think that doing something simple in Java is possible. I invite you to check out RIFE (http://rifers.org), which has even been acknowledged as a good choice by Bruce Tate. Rails is definitely a good choice if you like to switch everything ever and are 100% tired of anything Java related. I personally think that Java can be very agile when you pick the right technological back-end. This blog post might be interesting from you when you try out RIFE, coming from other Java technologies: http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/10/11/rife_misconceptions We now also have a scaffolding solution, that is actually useful to build upon instead of having to customize generated code, more information here: http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/10/19/announcing_rifecrud_1_0 Best regards, Geert Hi Ugo,

why don’t you try out some of the Java frameworks that have been working hard to simplify j2EE and web development. There has been a strong drive for this for many years, but people somehow don’t think that doing something simple in Java is possible. I invite you to check out RIFE (http://rifers.org), which has even been acknowledged as a good choice by Bruce Tate.
Rails is definitely a good choice if you like to switch everything ever and are 100% tired of anything Java related. I personally think that Java can be very agile when you pick the right technological back-end.

This blog post might be interesting from you when you try out RIFE, coming from other Java technologies:
http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/10/11/rife_misconceptions

We now also have a scaffolding solution, that is actually useful to build upon instead of having to customize generated code, more information here:
http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/10/19/announcing_rifecrud_1_0

Best regards,

Geert

]]> By: David Heinemeier Hansson http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-491 David Heinemeier Hansson Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:55:24 +0000 http://agylen.com/2005/10/22/tempted-by-rails/#comment-491 Please do come on over, Ugo. I had the same reservations switching from PHP(/Java) back in the day. Thinking that obviously a more popular platform would have more of what I needed. I was quite surprised to find that to be largely untrue. Ruby has come an incredibly long way over the past couple of years. And I'm of course doing mine to take it even further with Rails. For your specific examples. I just spoke with Eric Hatcher at EuroOSCON - he's the author of Lucene in Action - and he told me how he was building a Rails application that called Lucene over XML-RPC. Appeared to work very well. Regarding, RSS, Rails is already more than adequately served to do this without adding dependencies on additional libraries. Have a look at the <a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Base.html" rel="nofollow">example code for a RSS feed</a> (see under Builder) in the Action View docs. But the specifics will of course always vary. Some tasks will have been solved best in Ruby, some in Java, some in PHP, some in Smalltalk. If you're considering a specific project, try asking the lazy web how the library situation looks on Ruby for that problem (or how hard it would be to do by hand). Please do come on over, Ugo. I had the same reservations switching from PHP(/Java) back in the day. Thinking that obviously a more popular platform would have more of what I needed. I was quite surprised to find that to be largely untrue. Ruby has come an incredibly long way over the past couple of years. And I’m of course doing mine to take it even further with Rails.

For your specific examples. I just spoke with Eric Hatcher at EuroOSCON - he’s the author of Lucene in Action - and he told me how he was building a Rails application that called Lucene over XML-RPC. Appeared to work very well.

Regarding, RSS, Rails is already more than adequately served to do this without adding dependencies on additional libraries. Have a look at the example code for a RSS feed (see under Builder) in the Action View docs.

But the specifics will of course always vary. Some tasks will have been solved best in Ruby, some in Java, some in PHP, some in Smalltalk. If you’re considering a specific project, try asking the lazy web how the library situation looks on Ruby for that problem (or how hard it would be to do by hand).

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