[Seaside] Rolling with Ruby on Rails vs. Seaside

[Benjamin Pollack]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:13:27 +0100, Michael Neumann <mneumann at ntecs.de> wrote:
> Dmitry Dorofeev wrote:
> The default forms you mention is AFAIK not comparable to Mewa. All you
> can do with it is to edit one "flat" row of database table, where you
> show one form-element per column (which form-element you show depends on
> the column-type, if it's DATE, then you show a date-selection field, if
> it's VARCHAR, then you show a single-line edit field, if it's TEXT, then
> you show a textarea and so on...). AFAIK, it can't handle automatically
> relationships to other tables.

Fully automatic, no. You do have to modify the model class to specify
the relationship in code, but we're talking about one line, and it
remains vastly simpler than, say, GLORP. For example, if I were to
trying to make an appointment book, and have a table people and a
table phones and want people to have zero or more phone numbers, I can
do this:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_many :phones
end

and the scaffolding will automatically pick that up. This design is
highly reminiscent of Mewa to me, but actually (at least for simple
things) cleaner, and it works on both the model and the view layer at
once, not just one or the other. Rails supports quite a few such
one-line relationship specifications, including many-to-one,
one-to-many, many-to-many, conglomerate wrappers, and so on. They're
detailed quite well in Relational Rails tutorial at
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/TutorialBasicRelational .

> Seaside is IMHO much better suited for highly dynamic
> web-applications. Rails has "nice"-URLs, that's the biggest advantage I
> see on
> their side (and of course it's a "hype").
> 

Having used both, I agree that Seaside is much nicer for dynamic
sites, but I also think that calling Rails hype is dangerous. There
are some things that it does get right, in my opinion. The best part
of Rails to me is not Rails vs. Seaside but ActiveRecord vs.
GLORP/GOODS. GOODS is great if you have full control over the server
and don't really need to interface with anything. If you are trying to
write an application to interface with existing relational data,
though, or if you want your database to be accessible from
command-line, web, and GUI components, an RDBMS may be your only
solution. That gives you the choice of either coding the SQL manually
or using GLORP. GLORP is more powerful than ActiveRecord; I'm not
challenging that. But it's also much harder to use, getting things
running can be surprisingly complicated, and for many things,
ActiveRecord is sufficient. GLORP also supports essentially only one
database on Squeak (PostgreSQL), whereas ActiveRecord supports all of
the major ones at this point. For quite a few projects, that's a
showstopper, and it happens before we even really get to the
web-framework level.

The other thing that is appealing about Rails for most of the
developers I've talked to is the speed of development for simple web
applications that provide little more than CRUD. If all you want is a
quick GUI on a database, Rails goes extremely quickly, and the
scaffolding ends up being mostly sufficient. Seaside goes much more
slowly for this part of development. A lot of web apps these days are
just CRUD, and I think that many developers find Rails a lot easier
for that.

I'm really not sure that Seaside and Rails can or should be
competitors though. Rails buys you next to nothing when your website
advances beyond CRUD. Although its developers have worked hard to try
to give you a modular framework, it can't compare to Seaside
components, and I really missed the modal framework at several points
when I was working in Rails. Conversely, Seaside cannot, at the
moment, get a simple CRUD application up in juts a few moments with
pretty URLs. I'd love it if Seaside could do that, but I also really
do feel that Seaside and Rails are solving different problems, and
both solve them pretty well.

--Benjamin