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."

Looking to get started in Rails?

[RunFatBoy.net]

Along with the API documentation, I found the book "Agile Web Development with Rails" highly beneficial. For a while there, it was the only definitive, concise source of Rails examples.

Even if you're skeptical of the Rails hype, I encourage any developer worth their salt to sit down with it for a weekend. The whole concept of convention over configuration can be a bit mind bending, especially if you're use to Java's XML hell. It's always beneficial to force your brain to adapt to new languages; it encourage contrarian thinking when considering new solutions.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] -- Exercise for Web 2.0.

Re:Rails is Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I am still a java developer until someone starts to pay me to do rails fulltime. But, yes, I am doing rails in all my consulting and side work now...as well as all my personal apps. So, java still pays the bills but ruby/rails is the way of the future for me.

I equate it to the java transition that happened some years back....i have to still do java until the industry starts to realize the power of rails, just as I had to do C until they started to use Java.

Re:Kudos to RoR...

[ievans]

If you're using J2EE/Java EE for simple data-driven web sites a la RoR, then you're probably not the target developer for the Java EE platform. I have nothing against these web frameworks and the people who love them, I should add. It's just that the average /.er doesn't see the need for the features that are at the core of enterprise Java, and therefore they dismiss the platform as being too heavyweight. Sure, for small-scale development. The same mentality pops up in discussions on whether, e.g. MySQL needs transactions. It's kind of like hearing somebody who once built a dog house talk about the design requirements of a skyscraper.

With that being said, Java EE 5 will make enterprise Java developer's lives much easier. EJBs, everyone's favorite whipping boy, are a lot easier to code now.

Karma Whore Tutorials

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=181523&cid= 15012418 [slashdot.org]

Re:Kudos to RoR...

[helix_r]

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of web-apps are actually in-house apps that have a fairly small number of concurrent users.

Sadly, thousands of dev groups all over the world are slaving away very hard at j2ee simply because, well, its a good thing to have on one's resume or because consultants can bill mega-hours by building a "scalable enterprise application".

If people were honest about their motivations and real scalability requirements, it would be clear that j2ee fits a niche market and that more rapid, easier-to-use dev frameworks like RoR fill mainstream needs.

Re:I haven't heard much

[Sokie]

I think an important thing to note here is that Rails is an web application framework for the Ruby programming language whereas PHP is just a programming language (with a few framework-ish features like session management).

You could see similar productivity benefits by using a good PHP framework. The difference is that Rails is a fantasic framework and most of PHP's frameworks are mediocre. Part of this has to do with some of the language features that Ruby offers enabling Rails to be simpler to use and yet more powerful at the same time.

Personally, I love Rails and I really hope that one of the recent PHP5 frameworks gets up to the point where it is comparable. If it doesn't though, I won't feel too bad leaving PHP (mostly) behind me.

Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

[TodLiebeck]

First let me say that I'm the lead developer of Echo2 [nextapp.com], which absolutely requires JavaScript in order to function, so please take that into account as a bias if you desire.

I disagree with the statement "JavaScript is insecure". Implementations may be insecure, but the specification itself has no such problem. There have certainly been security holes discovered in JavaScript implementations. There have been equally dangerous security holes discovered in other aspects of the browser.

My other question to the "disable JavaScript" camp is, "what do you propose as an alternative?" Flash, client-side Java or any similar technology has the same security concerns as client-side JavaScript. The answer of "just use plain HTML" is not a solution. JavaScript and this "AJAX" stuff is not just about adding bling to applications--it's about eroding the barrier between remote and desktop applications.

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

[Senzei]

Zope is awesome for the things that zope already does. Extending it involves crawling pretty far into the zope system though.

Re:Ruby on Rails?

[Game_Ender]

That would be Monorail: http://www.castleproject.org/index.php/MonoRail [castleproject.org].

Re:I haven't heard much

[MPHellwig]

Every language is elegant if you know enough about it to do your job and ,despite that knowledge, don't have the motivation to learn something else. Me, I started coding in python a year ago, being my first 'real' language, I've come to a point where I'm even productive, so for me python is elegant. But I don't rule out the possibility that other languages are more elegant. Perhaps the best way to find out is to (re)do a project or 2 in another language. But I will continue python for a while, I still find it fun to do work with it and I still have to learn tons about the language and programming in general.