[Gllug] Ruby on Rails [was: OSS CMSs]

[Richard Turner]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 10:21 +0100, will wrote:
> Richard Turner wrote:
> > ...I'm not
> > convinced about Rails (www.rubyonrails.org), so I don't think I'll be
> > able to find a suitable Ruby-based CMS.
> 
> Well, Rails is not a CMS, but as a web application framework it is very 
> good.  I am co-writing a couple of sites using it and it has boosted my 
> productivity.  It is quite young and developing fast, recent aditions 
> include very good integrated XMLHTTPRequest support.  What exactly was 
> it that didn't convince you abuot it?
> 
> I recommend giving it a chance.  It has changed my language of choice 
> for doing web apps from perl or python to ruby and rails.
> 

Yeah, I know Rails isn't a CMS, but using it to create one with all the
functions we'd need wouldn't take a great deal of effort. More effort
than installing a CMS that's already been built and tested though.

Rails does look impressive but, in providing 'convenience' for the
developers it also places constraints upon them. I don't actually have
any concrete reservations about it, just a gut feeling. It may be just
that I don't like the idea of having to use plurals in my DB entity
names; I've always used the singular for an entity name just as one does
with a class name and would object to being forced to change. It's
trivial but sometimes little things like that are enough to put one off.

Then there's the black box generating code for me - it's a little too
similar to letting Access generate SQL for me (not that I'd ever use
Access for anything) - I don't know what it's doing and it'd take an
effort for me to trust it to do things right! Like I said, I'm probably
just a little too paranoid!

Lastly, I'm just finishing a small web app that I've written entirely in
Ruby and using PageTemplate
(http://www.coolnamehere.com/products/pagetemplate/) for presentation (I
like its similarity to Smarty - http://smarty.php.net/. Developing it
took far, far less time than similar projects I've done using PHP and
I'm not convinced that Rails would have saved me more time.

I am tempted to give it a go, just on a personal project or something
small, to see exactly what it's like; hopefully my doubts will disappear
then :)

Cheers,

Richard.
-- 
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."

30F2739E: B53 8184 E61F 3604 FBF3  4CCB EF07 2942 30F2 739E
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