On 5/11/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Damien Cassou</b> <<a href="mailto:damien.cassou@laposte.net">damien.cassou@laposte.net</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi,<br><br>a friend told me about "Ruby on Rails" which seems to be the Seaside of<br>Ruby.</blockquote><div><br>
If Rails is the Seaside of Ruby, then Ruby is in far more trouble than
I'd previously thought. Rails is a highly regularized and integrated
component stack and a couple of scripts that work within that stack.
It's also a way of arranging your files project files in a fairly
well-factored manner. That's pretty much it. There is no continuation
support. They are only just now getting components similar to <a href="http://ASP.NET">ASP.NET</a>
or JSPs, and the architecture basically prevents it Rails from ever
getting components like Seaside. There is no integrated authentication
framework, although there's now a fairly standardized pattern for how
to handle authentication that everyone cuts and pastes around. The form
helper tags are primitive and poorly documented. Interfacing Rails with
an existing database is extremely difficult, and using backends other
than MySQL is frequently problematic. It's not bad for simple CRUD apps
(the one area where I do use it a bit), and it certainly beats PHP or
Java hands-down, but it also doesn't bring anything particularly new to
the table.<br>
<br>
As for the video you link, that has always irked me. Scaffolding is
nice to get a rough feel for what your application should look like, to
show it to users and say, "Is this kind of what you're going for?" and
to get certain parts of your app "for free" <span style="font-style: italic;">during development</span>
so that you don't have to muck about in a SQL editor to, for example,
manually insert users into the database just so you can check something
dependent on users existing. But that's it. Scaffolding never survives
in the Real World, and the parts of that video that show how reordering
columns rearranges the order of elements on the page strikes me as
almost unethical; you will never be able to take advantage of that in
real-world use. It would be great if Seaside had scaffolding (or if
Squeak had a standard, lightweight ORM that worked with at least
PostgreSQL and MySQL), but Seaside is so much more advanced than Rails
that I think there's little we could pick up from there that would even
be applicable, let alone useful.<br>
<br>
If you want a Ruby framework more comparable to Seaside, check out Wee
by Michael Neumann. It's available on RubyGems, and supports most of
Seaside's ideas in an intuitive, mostly Ruby-like manner. If you
combine it with Og, a fairly robust ORM, you even get the scaffolding
voodoo you see in the Rails video. Otherwise, though, I'd encourage you
to stay with Seaside for awhile and maybe make a real app or two with
both Rails and Seaside and see what you think. My suspicion is that
you'll never want to go back to Rails again. :)<br>
<br>
--Benjamin<br>
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