On Jun 22, 2006, at 12:44 PM, Chad Woolley wrote:
Can't you feel the peace and contentment in this block of code? Ruby
is the language Buddha would have programmed in."
Yeah, being pragmatic, Buddha probably would be using RoR. The more
idealistic of us would likely be doing Smalltalk.
After reading several thousand blogs which argue the pros and cons of
RoR and seeing it used in a real shop, I think the benefit does
largely come down to the Ruby language itself.
Bingo. Rails is only good *because* of Ruby. The dynamic "magic"
that can be pulled to create very elegant looking DSLs (domain-
specific languages) is the secret sauce that makes Rails what is.
Sure, you can do wacky reflective stuff in Java and get close, but
the natures of those languages are different at a core layer.
Of course there's still
big cons compared to Java - my main gripes are lack of a real
refactoring, intelligent code-completing IDE
Many gripe about this. Personally I have had great success being
interactive and using IRB tab completion to explore and learn an
API. In Rails, script/console is amazing - your entire Rails
environment immediately accessible live.
, and lack of something as
nice as Maven to automatically manage your external and cross-project
dependencies.
RubyGems manages 3rd party library dependencies nicely, and with
Rails you can "freeze" it to a particular project. There is also
Capistrano (formerly Switchtower) for project automation such as
testing and deployment. I'm not aware of much in the way of
automated deployment tools in the Java world that compares to
Capistrano. Its much trickier to generically deploy a Java
application because of the various ways every application server
deploys.
Oh, and speaking of XML parsing performance - AJAX is now officially
old news. AJAJ (Async Javascript And JSON, Javascript Serialized
Object Notation) is the wave of the future. We don't need no stinking
XML!
Sending back XML was old news almost a decade ago.
Erik
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