Ruby on Rails for DB2 Developers

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby on Rails seems to be the new hotness in the world of web development, right up there with Ajax. IBM DeveloperWorks has a helpful howto on how to bring the worlds of Ruby on Rails and your DB2 framework together. From the article: 'Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment.'"

Ruby could be packaged better

[bogaboga]

I have read about the beauty of Ruby and how it's better than Python or Perl. I'd not like to start flames but I wonder why Ruby does not have an IDE like that of SmallTalk. Yes, SmallTalk is old time stuff, but this absence does not help Ruby's popularity.

Many times, I have tried learning it on my own and have been frustrated by missing or conflicting versions of components. I'm waiting for some folks to develop a one install package that will take care of all packages needed to develop serious apps on Ruby. An IDE like Access on the JET database engine would be very welcome.

There is some effort to this end. These folks http://www.railslivecd.org/ [railslivecd.org] have started some work in this direction.

DB2... The only change?

[Aladrin]

I can understand wanting to get news of the DB2 adapter out to the public... But to attach a tutorial to it that is basically just another RoR tutorial seems pointless. The only differences in this article from every other RoR article were in the paragraph that describes how to install the DB2 adapter for RoR.

-yawn-

Re:DB2... The only change?

[Anonymous Coward]

But to attach a tutorial to it that is basically just another RoR tutorial seems pointless.

It's called "jumping onto the bandwagon"; you may have heard of it. It's what all of IBM's "cutting-edge" developerworks-articles (written by some sophomore pimply FOSS-monkey intern) are about.

Re:Really good news.

[Decaff]

Getting the likes of IBM to recognize the usefulness of the Rails framework is a little more than just another DBMS supported: rails used to be bashed, especially by java people, for not being "enterprise ready". They criticised the limitations of the active record ORM (but it's open source, you can either extend it or make your custom sql calls), or the relative immaturity of ruby and libraries.

Now such claims will sound less credible so more dubious people might give it a try.

IBM has been hosting articles about RoR for some time - this is not a major change in attitude - it is indeed simply getting just annother DBMS supported. Rails is bashed for not being enterprise ready for more than just the range of databases supported. This additional support does nothing to change the limitations of the Active Record approach (and the ability to extend the system does not make it enterprise ready).

There are many aspects of Ruby and Rails that remain a significant barrier to much enterprise use - performance, for one thing (Ruby VMs that might address this problem seem stuck in permanent beta), the ability to handle international characters is another.

To assume that these issues are somehow fixed simply because IBM has provided DB2 support is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Re:Not as hot

[masklinn]

The big difference is that Rails is an actual tool, with a of buzz around it, while AJAX is wankery for marketroïds and is only buzz.

Re:DB2... The only change?

[Decaff]

Massive databases often support multiple presentation layers - ecommerce, internal administration, parter access, internal reporting, etc, etc. Even if you're doing one in Java/websphere there's no reason another couldn't be in RoR.

There is good reason why you may not want it to be. The Java/J2EE/Websphere approach often uses clustering and cacheing to give high performance and scalability. You would not want to let a small RoR application (or any other type of application) loose on such such a system.

I find it hard to believe that

[Mofaluna]

Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment.

While much can be said in favor of RoR, especially the fact that the approach is the best thing since sliced bread for a certain 'niche' market, non-enterprise applications, the above quote is wrong. There is a huge difference between efficiently writing web applications, that which Ror is good at, and writing efficient web applications, that which RoR traded of in favor of efficiently writing web applications.

Re:RoR vs Django?

[jcroft]

I would say this is a bit of the Python philosophy showing up in Django: Explicit is always better than implicit. Obviously Rails doesn't share this philosophy, and that's fine. But Django definitely intends to be very Pythonic, and model definitions are no exception.

Re:Ruby could be packaged better

[Decaff]

However, I do believe that Ruby is one of those languages that you can learn by just using it from command line. You do not need an IDE or huge framework to do fun stuff. You can at least get a feel for how Ruby does stuff to put you off it or to keep investigating.

There is very strong evidence based on decades of research (such as with Smalltalk in the 70s) that says that the best way to learn and use OOP languages is with a good GUI. There is nothing to match browsing classes and dynamically inspecting objects during the execution of a program.

I am very skeptical whenever I hear 'you don't need a GUI'. This seems to me to be an argument along the lines of 'if we don't implement it, you don't need it'.

Why Ruby? Why Rails?

[mangu]

In all these articles about Ruby and RoR people always mention how great Ruby is and how great RoR is. After trying both, I must assume that I must be pretty stupid, because I fail to notice all that greatness. Let's see some case studies:

1) I work for an aerospace company, and I recently needed some way to get NORAD TLEs [norad.mil] from Celestrak [celestrak.com]. Never mind what TLEs are, I went to CPAN [slashdot.org] and found what I needed in a few minutes. How does Ruby compare to Perl in available libraries and utilities? If I have to get the TLE specifications [celestrak.com] and code my own functions in Ruby, sorry, but I'd rather cope with Perl's shortcomings.

2) Occasionally I have to do some web applications to access corporate databases in Oracle, Ingres, and Postgres. The data contains international characters, which may be in UTF or ISO-8859, I need support for both and an easy way to shift between them, often in the same application. For this kind of work I use PHP together with the eGroupWare [egroupware.org] suite. I have no need for very complicated code here, these are mostly simple web forms and tables, which PHP+eGroupWare handle quite well. Using the built-in etemplates utility I can code applications very quickly.

3) For really complex work I use C, or C++ with Qt if there is need for a GUI. I often create prototypes for my C code, using either Perl, Python, or Matlab to develop some of the algorithms. After I have the algorithm, I reimplement it in C using the many libraries available, such as GSL, Lapack, or FFTW, for instance.

With all that, I have yet to find a reasonable niche where Ruby would fit, with or without Rails. I can see how someone who wants to learn only one language would think Ruby is the best, but I cannot imagine being more productive in Ruby than in the languages I use for each of the jobs I described.

And the attitude one finds in Slashdot "hey stupid, Ruby is 'teh' language, you must be a troll" doesn't help either. For any other language I can find websites that give detailed descriptions of its good and bad points, but I have seen very little on comparing Ruby with other languages. From the little I have seen, it gives the impression of being somewhat remotely related to Lisp, like Python. How about creating a site that shows some examples comparing code written in Ruby with the same program in Python, Perl, C, PHP, Java, etc?

Re:Ruby could be packaged better

[aCapitalist]

I am very skeptical whenever I hear 'you don't need a GUI'. This seems to me to be an argument along the lines of 'if we don't implement it, you don't need it'.

Actually, it's "You don't need it until we actually implement it". That's pretty typical of the linux-type crowd though that have always screamed that Vi and Emacs are the epitomy of advanced development environments.