Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1

MrByte420 writes "The Ruby On Rails team today released version 1.1 of the web framework. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.' New features were examined back in February at Scottraymond.net and include Javascript/AJAX integration, enhancements to active record, and enhanced testing suites. Not to mention upgrading this time promises to be a piece of cake."

Ruby Tutorials

[emo boy]

http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top -ruby-on-rails-tutorials [digitalmediaminute.com]

Re:Getting started

[Noer]

First, despite what some people say, I think you really have to learn the Ruby language first. Yes, you can get by coding 'by rote' but a deep understanding of this really elegant language will help a lot. Second, there are some great tutorials at the Ruby on Rails site [rubyonrails.com] but I think the best is the Agile Web Development with Rails book, though it hasn't yet been updated with the new Rails 1.1 features.

Re:Getting started

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming Ruby - a free ruby eBook - http://www.rubycentral.com/book [rubycentral.com]

Re:Getting started

[BioCS.Nerd]

This is a good place to start: http://poignantguide.net/ruby/ [poignantguide.net] and then perhaps this: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/ [pragmaticprogrammer.com] (Either one is good -- I used the latter)

Or, if you're on the lazy side of things, you can try it right within your browser here: http://tryruby.hobix.com/ [hobix.com]

I hope this helps.

Re:Getting started

[gavri]

The book is Programming Ruby [pragmaticprogrammer.com]. That's the second edition.

The first edition is available online [rubycentral.com]. You don't need to buy the second edition unless you are really serious about learning Ruby. The first will do for evaluating the language and playing around with Rails. And if you really want to learn Rails (after going through the tutorials [digitalmediaminute.com]), Agile Web Development with Rails [pragmaticprogrammer.com] is the book I recommend.

Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

[billstewart]

Sigh. Rails is joining the list of things that encourage people to use Javascript applications, just as all the AJAX stuff does. So anybody who's using those applications has to toast their security.

The problem isn't that you can't write secure Javascript code - you can. The problem is that if anybody wants to *use* your nice secure AJAX/RAILS/etc. application, they need to turn Javascript ON in their browser, which means they're vulnerable to maliciously-written Javascript on any other web pages they visit.

There's no easy way around the problem if you want to run the new cool AJAX applications, and there's a lot you can do with a programming model that makes it easy to distribute functions between the client and the server. For Mozilla users, it's probably possible for somebody to implement per-site permissions for Javascript the way they do for cookies, images, etc. For IE, though, you're just toast.

Re:Getting started

[gavri]

I'm not sure what you mean by a website that can show off what the language can do. Ruby, the language is independent of the Ruby on Rails framework.

But if you do mean that you want to see Ruby executed, an online interpreter [hobix.com] is available.

If you're asking for examples of what Rails can do, it can do only what you can do using any other language on the server-side, only much faster and with cleaner code.

Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

[gregarican]

Ever heard of using the Trusted Sites [microsoft.com] list in Internet Explorer? seems to work for me for per-site permissions.

Re:Upgrading

[metamatic]

The OS X problem is that Apple shipped an old and somewhat broken version of Ruby. I'm sure that now that Rails is getting more attention, that will be fixed in the next release of OS X... Ocelot or Liger or whatever it is.

http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html [apple.com]

This seems good for layman understanding

[AgNO3]

http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html [apple.com] Found that link on the ruby on rails site and it was the best description for a non techie like me that I could find in fast.

Re:Upgrading

[masklinn]

If you want Ruby on Rails 1.1:

1. Check that you have the latest Ruby version (1.8.4) by running "ruby -v". If you do, go to step 2, if you don't upgrade your Ruby.
2. Check that you do have the Ruby Gems software. Just type "gem -v" in the CLI. If you don't have RubyGems then go get it [rubygems.org]
3. Once Gem is installed, just type "gem install rails --include-dependencies", this will install the latest version of Ruby on Rails and every package that's required by Rails (Rake, ActiveSupport, ActiveRecord, ActionPack, ActionMailer and ActionWebService). If you've ever used a Debian, think of "gem" as a Ruby-oriented version of apt-get.
4. You're done, start Railing away.

No problem / Noscript

[fforw]

The noscript firefox extension [noscript.net] lets you forbid execution of javascript/java/flash by default and only enable it again for some sites (whitelist). Internet Explorer has "Trusted Sites" or something.. So all in all that is not that much of a problem..

Re:Ruby Apps

[gregarican]

There are tools for making Ruby into self-extracting executables --> http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.ht ml [erikveen.dds.nl]. But for a true compiled solution that will likely be bundled with Ruby 2.0. It should include a VM --> http://www.atdot.net/yarv/ [atdot.net]. As for GUI apps there are extension libraries for Tk, Qt, Fox, WxWindows, GTK, etc.

Re:Kudos to RoR...

[ievans]

No offense, but the oft-repeated anecdote about hundreds of poor schlups being forced to code horrendously overweight J2EE-apps while consultants wheel-away wheelbarrows full of cash doesn't ring true to me. What organization has this kind of money and time, especially since the downturn and what with offshoring development and all? Where are these companies?

I also question your use of the term "mainstream." One person's niche technology is the next person's mainstream one. There are different market segments for development frameworks and technologies. Ones that require the sort of transaction, security, and connectivity capabilities that exist in Java EE would find RoR severely lacking. As you found out, stand-alone web apps with low numbers of concurrent users don't need the security, transaction, and connectivity support in Java EE, so those developers don't use it.

Zope - What RoR wants to be when it grows up.

[Qbertino]

You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot.
Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here.
But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:

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Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout

In an educative and entertaining webcast [nasa.gov], Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.org] and Django [djangoproject.com]. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears [turbogears.org] and Zope [zope.org] are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch.
In a nutshell: EJB [sun.com], Hibernate [hibernate.org] and various other Java [sun.com] flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB [softwarereality.com] or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed.
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Re:Getting started

[CptPicard]

Hear hear, this is so true. Although I have been writing small Ruby scripts for a few years now, when I first took a look at RoR, I often had to pause to understand what exactly was happening in those very terse lines of code. You really need to understand Ruby's syntax and a lot of the philosophy quite deeply before you can grasp what is going on in RoR code. Without that understanding, you will never advance further in RoR than copying the tutorials.

This is an example of a more general syntax-vs-semantics tradeoff in programming languages. Sure it's impressive how little code you have to write, but the other side of this is that the required understanding per line of code density is higher.

Upgrading IS painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Typo and the popular Globalize plug-in break down when run on Rails 1.1. So far for seamless backwards compatibility unfortunately.

Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

[nuzak]

Out of the box, rails doesn't add any javascript at all. The fact that when you do use the javascript generation, the fact that it's so closely tied to prototype .js is my main problem. Got a method or attribute called "extend"? Too bad, prototype owns it. Nice use of namespaces, fellas.

Re:I haven't heard much

[larry bagina]

If you're doing strightforward CRUD database stuff, RoR automagically sets up everything for you. If that's good enough, then you've saved some time. Even if you need to tinker with it, it's often less work than other languages.

Re:Zope - What RoR wants to be when it grows up.

[ubernostrum]

In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered.

Except he got more than a few things wrong. To pick one example, he seems to be under the impression that Django doesn't support i18n/l10n when, in fact, we ship all the core Django applications with support for twenty-odd languages, and Django uses an extensible gettext-based system to make it easy to translate third-party apps and add new languages. We even include an i18n JavaScript library to make translation strings available to JS code. Our admin app even has a setting that chooses which language to render a page with based on the incoming Accept-Language header.

Moral of the story: nice video, but the guy hasn't necessarily done his homework.

See it & Try it & You're a Star?

[JoeRails]

Who's using Rails? Check out the Rails wiki site [rubyonrails.org] for hundreds of example sites

And if you want a free cPanel/SSH account to download the new Rails version in to see what the craziness is all about - check out www.HostingRails.com [hostingrails.com]

I think its safe to say that Ruby on Rails is the fastest growing Web 2.0-friendly framework - and for good reason. I mean c'mon - the average developer can pick up a few Rails tutorials and have a working demo app (w/ CRUD scaffold action and such) on their local box in a few minutes. Throw in some easily-incorporated Prototype [conio.net] and Scriptaculous [aculo.us] effects, and this developer is the new cool kid on the block.

Crazy

~JoeRails