Garbage Burrito

http://www.romaframework.org/

Ruby will have to wait until it's not fringe before I'll play with it. We are using JRuby with the BSF in DataVision for some minor scripting. I can't hire ruby programmer's and I don't want to have to explain to someone why I'm using it.

I haven't tried roma yet but i'll check it out.

I know how you feel about fringe technologies Dave, I'll never forget your DataFlex stories. But trust me, Rails is it. It beats the pants of any web framework, hands down. A lot of people are saying it's hype, but it's hype for a reason. It's already sneaking its way into the spotlight, and in a few years you all will be assimilated ;)

And you don't need to hire ruby developers, look for perl and php people and convert them.

Of course this is not to say it's going to replace Java, that's just not going to happen. And I wouldn't bring it into enterprise shops where you would have to do some convincing, cause you'd have to do a lot of convincing(particularly with DBA's).

No Java framework will ever touch Rails, simply because of the dyanmic nature of Ruby. It's not feasible to make Java bend like Ruby.

Don't knock it till you try it.

Ruby on Rails. when I hear this I remember the movie Shawshank Redemption. Great movie horrible title. it actually got the award: worst movie title of the year. I know rails was a cool MIT project and Ruby is a scripting language. and I know that it's unusually easy to hitch a database to a presentation layer. it's unfortuniate, but I see Production Oriented, Business Minded, Non-Technical Managers, seeing ror as an un-necessary addition to a previously functioning entity. It will take ror lovers, like you, to establish the nitch.

FYI, Rails was not an MIT project. It was developed by 37Signals while writing their Basecamp software.

With Software as a Service becoming more popular, people aren't really going to care what platform it's on ;) But I definatly don't think it will ever find it's way into the enterprise shops, with a few exceptions of course.

I stand Corrected =Þ

If memory serves, the base language Ruby has been around for awhile. I first looked at it around 6 years ago. I've been watching the rails thing for about a year now, I'll probably stick my toe in before the end of the year.

I still get a big laugh out of the 'Dynamically-typed' spin... The term has always been 'loosly-typed' or 'strongly-typed'. I love the way they changed that to make it sound like it was an advantage. Now, java becomes a 'static-typed' language which makes it sound old and outdated.

I have seen so many of these come an go, I remember back in the 80's I spent a lot of hours learning Prolog. It was going to be the next big thing, the Japanese were working on a chip that ran on Prolog.

I have become so used to source-level debugging now since we re-engineered our development tool chain (Eclipse/MyEclipse). Can I get a robust IDE with SLD in Ruby?

Roma is nice, but still very young, it has IoC via Spring (I am not crazy about IoC as it hides alot from the developer and makes apps more difficult to debug in some cases). Basically, your app is a collection of POJO's. The view and persistence are handled by the framework.

Roma can generate the 'view' for the app several ways, Currently, Echo2 is supported for web app generation. Echo2 is a really nifty web development environment itself, it has a great collection of RIA widgets and good AJAX support. No HTML/CSS/Javascript programming required or used. Everything is coded in pure Java (similar to Google's web toolkit). They have a very nice Eclipse WYWISYG interface building tool (EchoStudio).

The demo's are worth taking a look at:

http://www.nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/

I don't know if you've been playing with any of the Java EE 5 stuff yet. Java 1.5/5.0 has added some very cool new language features that are used a lot in the new EE framework. Generics (no more casting errors!), Enhanced Looping (like loosly typed languages), Autoboxing of primitives (no more Primitive->Object fluff), variable arguments for methods, and very cool Annotation extensions (you can define your own custom Annotations similar to classes!) that let you catch complex framework dependencies at compile time or give much more traceable errors at runtime.

For example, web services are way easier now.

Yeah, Ruby was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto or Matz quite a while ago. It's been fairly popular in Japan. Rails has only been around for a few years, and I think it went 1.0 around the end of last year.

Strange error... Guess Rails isn't perfect... But who/what is?

http://office.bensoft.com/application_error_rails.gif

Rails is perfect, but I'm not ;)

"I still get a big laugh out of the 'Dynamically-typed' spin... "

It's not so much that it's dynamically typed, I actually prefer strong typing, it's that the objects are dynamic. I think the biggest advantage over Java is that you can add methods and functionality to classes at runtime. While this may not give you the warm fuzzies of implementing an interface and always knowing a method is there, it makes development a heck of a lot easier.

I love Spring and IOC, and it's great for Java, but it's a solution to a development problem. What I like about Ruby is that these problems are solved as a part of the language. AOP is built right in. IOC is not an issue with Rails because dependencies are managed automatically through the framework.

Infact I don't even like to compare Java and Rails that much, because they're different animals. I think Rails is more likely to eat into the PHP market.