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."

Let me...

Let me be the first (or not) to say congrats to the dev team. I am sure this will make it easier to connect people, make money, and functionality online.

Ruby Tutorials

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

Ajax a welcome addition

It is nice to see them add the AJAX / JavaScript integration. I would like to see more frameworks include a mature AJAX framework to facilitate more dynamic interaction. To date the best I have seen so far is Echo2 [nextapp.com] which incorporate an event driven architecture that allows for seamless integration of client side events transmitted to the server side architecture. In all good show, I hope more frameworks will follow suit.

Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

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:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

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

Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole

And images expose you to things like the WMF exploit, so let's just go back to the 1980s of web design.

No problem / Noscript

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..

Rails is Great

It allowed me to develop this job website [nashjobs.com] in 2 1/2 months spare time with 400 unit/functional tests. I was a Java programmer, and now there's no going back ;-)

Any other former Java programmers relate?

Looking to get started in Rails?

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.

Web an API junkyard

This posting only serves to remind me what an API junkyard web programming has become. Let's see, we need server side Ruby to transmit and execute Javascript that manipulates a DOM to emit HTMP, gracefully degrading features for anachronistic browers. Zowie!

Re:Web an API junkyard

Aaaaaand how is that different from desktop development? Actually, how is that different from any other development?

Yeah, shocker, APIs call other APIs to call other APIs. That's how software works.

All you did was describe the basic model of server code delivering client code. Which is the future.

Kudos to RoR...

... May this be yet another nail in the coffin of the life-sucking tedium that is J2EE.

Re:Kudos to RoR...

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.

This seems good for layman understanding

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.

Ruby Apps

I'm not a Ruby developer, the most I've done is just skimmed over some Ruby tutorials. I like the ease and simplicity of the Ruby syntax.

Is it possible to make stand-alone, executable apps in Ruby? What about GUI?

Re:Ruby Apps

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.

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

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

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.

Ruby on Rails?

I'm still waiting for C# on Cinderblocks.

Upgrading IS painful

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

Oracle support

We're dying to use Ruby on Rails. Developers in my group talk about it almost daily. Unfortunately the lack of solid Oracle database support is a showstopper. I'm inquiring about whether we might allocate funding to sponsor development of a stable, complete Oracle driver; my employer has a history of funding open source projects.

Still missing: many to many support

What I missed in rails most is proper support -- and that includes decent scaffold generation support -- for what is the most frequent case in nearly every non-trivial database application: many-to-many relationships. Thsi means showing an antry from tableA and in the same screen a scrollable/pageable list of entries from tableB which are connected through a join table with options for inserting or deleting tableB entries from/into the join table (and tableB, if necessary). From the release notes it seems that nothing has been done to make rails support this better. So, essentially, you have to do everything yourself again and you probably have to work around the problems regarding the id column in the join table.

I'm having fun with this

I've been dabbling with Rails and Ruby for a couple of months now, and I don't want to get into a big debate on whether it's more efficient, more popular, or whatever semi-quantifiable metric you want to apply to it...

The bottom line for me right now is that I'm having fun with it. I've been really looking forward to the little extra time I've put aside each day to work with Rails; although I think that a lot of the fun I'm having is just pleasure at using Ruby.

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

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

How about Catalyst?

I did a database-oriented web app last year. I found Catalyst http://catalyst.perl.org/ [perl.org] really really useful. The MVC pattern it imposes on you really helped. Ditto for the web framework, plugins, DB access and scaffolding.

From what I can tell, RoR is conceptually pretty close to Catalyst, but me being a perl-head, I chose Catalyst. Anyone tried them both? Any comments?

Re:How about Catalyst?

I'm a c/perl guy and don't know catalyst but wrote some sites in perl using html::template and I just read http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/06/02/catalyst.html ?page=2 [perl.com] for a short tutorial.
I also just made my first rails website in 10 days, this includes a cms and also an elobarate scheduling app as well as some other stuff like user manager etc. This also includes the time to learn the language and get my head around concepts. The major problem with rails is documentation, there is just to much of it scattered around and should be organised more. But with the rails api website, the ruby docs and some tutorials you will get there.

The last 2 days was just finetuning what the customer wanted. From the tutorial I would say rails is easier to read. I think perl has more power over ruby, just as C has more power over Perl as you can go more low level with it. But ruby/rails is much easier to read and even less to type.
I will still remain to use C and Perl for a lot of stuff. But when it comes to websites / web applications I will stick with rails. I can't see myself turning back. Maintaining and extending code is dead easy also the ajax integration is great.

Great news!

My Rails development [planetargon.com] firm has been working with Rails for over a year now and as of early last summer... we're exclusively Rails-focused. We've been working with features in 1.1 for several months now and are glad to see that these features are now part of the 1.1 release.

Ruby on Rails on PostgreSQL = Enterprise Rails! :-)

Re:Getting started

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

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

Re:Getting started

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

Everyone raves about the poignant guide, but I found that after reading it for 20 minutes, I hadn't done much except read stories and comic strips. I really didn't have much of an appreciation for the language.

There's something to be said for making a potentially dry subject interesting, but it seems to go too far with it and actually spread the actual information too thin.

Just my opinion, of course.

Re:Getting started

Not trying to insult or anything, but did you RTA? I believe the TFA points to the ruby on rails website which has plenty of resources. One of the links across the top labeled "screencasts [rubyonrails.org]" even has videos you can watch.

Re:Getting started

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.

Re:I haven't heard much

To me, an intermediate PHP coder, it seems like a great way to move forward with developing new apps. Lots of redundancy in my PHP, and so I'm seeking a simpler, more elegant solution. Of course, that's partly due to my non-expert programming skills, but I'm switching over nonetheless. So, I guess you could say that it's gaining a following. The question is, as you point out rightly, how many sites have used it in their framework?

Perhaps there's no good answer, as commercial hosts are only now finally intergrating the Ruby code into their servers. But that they've elected (for example, Site5, my own host) to include the Rails in their hosting options seems to indicate that it's growing...

Re:I haven't heard much

We're using it for indi [getindi.com] with a PostgreSQL back end. It's working pretty well so far, even with a Jabber server hitting the same database [blogs.com].

Re:Getting started

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:Upgrading

For now Windows-based implementations are a "piece of cake [rubyforge.org]." But in time Mac OS X will be as well. This RoR project is still relatively young so I think the hype is moving forward faster than the underlying technology. Nevertheless a good thing to investigate...

Re:Getting started

I recently finished the Pick Axe book 2nd ed and would highly recommend it. Like one of the other replies notes, it's a Ruby book, not a Rails book, but I agree you should learn Ruby first. The first edition of this book is available for free on the web at various locations (eg: http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ [rubycentral.com]). I started using this several years ago but got sidetracked. The recent Rails fuss has grabbed my attention again, so I finally sat down and dug in. It's now my language of choice for most programming tasks (quickly replacing Perl altogether for my needs). I've yet to do any Rails work, but have a few personal projects in mind that might be good testing for it. Ruby definitely stands on it's own as a language, Rails is just a beautiful use of a beautiful language.

Cheers.
-Ben

Re:I haven't heard much

Penny Arcade is using it since a few weeks. I don't know if the glitches with the site lately have anything to do with that, but Tycho sometimes mentioned them himself. So, a new release should be welcome to them.

Re:Congratulations Ruby on Rails

Remember when folks ridiculed Java for being a silly, slow, toy that would never be ready for prime-time with no ide's and useless(cr)applets?

It seems like only yesterday, wait, it was.

Re:Upgrading

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]

Re:I haven't heard much

Ruby started to gain popularity about 5 years ago when the following article was published:

Programming in Ruby

Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2001
A freely available pure object-oriented language
By Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt

(you can't read the whole thing without an account so no link)

Granted, it's been around for over a decade, but it took a while before it got attention outside Japan.

Re:I haven't heard much

Nobody. They're all to busy hyping it and posting on slashdot about how great it is. Meanwhile all us PHP/JSP/ASP/whatever programmers are off actually making web applications.

Re:Getting started

I would suggest 'Programming Ruby'. The first edition can be read online here: http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ [rubycentral.com]

Ruby is a wonderful language that is very flexible. I came to it from Python. I enjoy using both languages, but Ruby has replaced Python as my 'home' language. I don't do web devel.... there's much more to Ruby than Rails :) Ruby is an excellent Windows or Unix sys admin language or a great general purpose programming language or a scientfic/computational language as well. Rails simply demonstrates Ruby's power and flexibility.
 
Ruby will be around for a long time.

Re:I haven't heard much

I haven't heard much about Ruby since the (geek) media blitz of over a year ago. How many people actually use Ruby on Rails? I see the same thing happening with AJAX.

Its the way geeks do things.

It reminds me back in the late 90s when everything was Java!!!

It reminds me of even further back in high school.

Back then, everybody was interested in sex, talked about sex, wanted sex, but nobody was doing sex.

Same thing with Java in the late 90s and Ruby today, and AJAX tomorrow.

Re:Upgrading

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.

Re:I haven't heard much

I'm coding a large-scale site in RoR right now. It'll be deployed across three Lighttpd servers with two MySQL servers. I'm about three weeks into the site and I've probably saved a month of work already over how long it'd take me to do the same work in Java or PHP.

Rails' efficiency won't continue to be that high as I get more into the business logic and smaller details, but for the data layers that I'm doing now Rails blows away anything else. I'll still be at least 50% ahead of where I'd be using Java and PHP when it's finished. The code will be way cleaner because Ruby is a better designed language than either Java or PHP. It'll be a snap to add features later, which is the problem we're currently having with our site and its 20,000+ lines of PHP code.

I've coded and managed Java and PHP sites. PHP is easier to work with than Java for most small to medium sites and Java can be easier on large sites. Neither of them are better than Rails for any size site.

I predict that Ruby on Rails will become the big third competitor in the market for building web apps. Java will still be bigger on the very high end because of EJBs and the need to interface with legacy systems and PHP will still be bigger on the low end because it's easier to learn since you don't need to know OOP to get started. Ruby on Rails will be the language/framework that finally fits into that middle market where most medium to large businesses are. PHP's code is too messy to work there without a lot of coder discipline and either a custom or well-done Open Source framework and Java is just too complicated.

Re:I haven't heard much

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:I haven't heard much

First, scaffolding helps getting started because the programmer can work on code rather than building forms that connect to the database. The trick there is to use the 'generate' script to create the scaffolding in real code rather than use the run-time scaffolding. The generated code is pretty clean and does the bare minimum required, which is a great platform for building on.

Second, with ActiveRecord the code feels very close to the data. When working within Rails' naming conventions it's very simple to do stuff like track back and forth in a data record and figure out what belongs to it (foreign keys referring to your data) and what it belongs to (foreign keys in your data referring to other data). Honestly, it seems heavy, but it works so well you forget about that. There have been a few times where I needed some data and found it already in my model object because the database relationship was there. This stuff has been made even better in Rails 1.1 because it stretches the relationship even more (relationships through other tables).

Everything also gets done with a lot less code both because Rails makes things easy and because Ruby is designed really well.

Lets use Google as an example ....

As I see it , even if GoogleOS will not become the desktop standart , Google is heading in the direction of enabling many of the functions currently availble only as installed applications , through a web browser . Writely and Gmail are both AJAX based , and these are a word processor and a IM/Email application , both clearly target desktop-application dominated markets. To understand it better , you might want to use Gmail through a simple Javascript disabled interface (it is also supported, through basic HTML view) and see how it behaves . I believe that everything that is not content, will be delivered using an AJAX based interface in the near future .

Re:Getting started

There has already been several replies pointing to very good resources, so I won't repeat those here. I myself came to Ruby from PHP - I had never used anything else (unless JavaScript counts), and I immediately fell in love. I've never gone back, and I don't think you will, either.

The main difference is that Ruby is a real *language*, not just a collection of Perl scripts (though PHP is maturing now; don't want to start a flame war.) You can alter it in almost any way you like, that's what so great about dynamic languages.

There are things you'll probably find confusing at first (I presume you know basic Object Oriented Programming from PHP 5,) particularly metaprogramming. Once you understand that, you'll be able to do things extremely simple and elegant.

Re:I haven't heard much

I haven't heard much about Ruby since the (geek) media blitz of over a year ago. How many people actually use Ruby on Rails? I see the same thing happening with AJAX.

It's bad for publicity, but a lot of development with the new generation of web frameworks is taking place behind corporate firewalls and under NDAs. Some frameworks do advertise lists of public websites which use them [djangoproject.com], though. :)

Re:What a crock

XML + HTTP != SOAP

Re:But still doesn't scale

Or maybe we could all get a link to the actual article itself [poocs.net], rather than someones blog linking to the article.