What is Digg?19 Comments
- dafragsta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Go to rubyonrails.org if you are still in the dark on Rails and watch the first screencast. If you've ever coded for more than 5 minutes in your life, it's sure to make you say "See, shouldn't it have always been that organized?"
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5For one thing Ruby is a fairly well thought out, uniform, object oriented language with similarities to SmallTalk, Perl, and many other languages. It has a somewhat unique, clean syntax with slight similarities to Perl and Python.
PHP is a collection of functions wrapped up in a familiar C/Java/Perl-like syntax (that could be a pro or con), with some object orientation tacked on as an afterthought and it really shows when you try things like calling instance methods in class method context or vice versa. OO coding in PHP and Perl is quite painful compared to a real OO language like Ruby.
For me it was just a matter of trying out Ruby and RoR. It's hard to explain, but things just feel right when you're coding in Ruby. Objects and inheritance just behaves as you would expect (because of the message passing architecture found in SmallTalk and Obj-C). In PHP and Java class methods have funky inheritance behaviour that IMO limits the usefulness of OO.
That said, if you are already using PHP and familiar with the tools you might not find Rails to be so great right off the bat. If you find yourself frustrated or limited with PHP and it's OO functionality, or find yourself coding things that seem very repetitive, then Rails may be great for you. If you think the benefits of OO and MVC are real then you might prefer Rails. If you are a programmer first and foremost and a web developer second then you should find the Rails console absolutely wonderful from the beginning, otherwise it could take some growing on you.
If you prefer the beauty and simplicity of "3.days.from_now" and "Time.now.next_week" over things like "time() + 3*24*3600" then Rails may be for you.
Personally, I love Ruby and Rails and I hope to never code PHP again in the near future. It sounds like they have PHP6 on the right track but I feel it needs a lot of work to be on par with languages like Python and Ruby. PHP has a lot of advantages too, I just think Ruby is better overall. - locnguyen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4As I guy who develops J2EE apps for a living I can tell you my favorite thing about Rails is how much less configuration I have to do. Secondly, the process of getting even the most basic application with a database up and running is just plain simple.
- NoUse, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4acts_as_ferret is good stuff. I'm using it on a current project.
- spliffy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4rails is a MVC framework using the ruby language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
the idea is to provide development teams the ability to create applications quickly and easily using a tried and tested object oriented framework.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
there are comparable MVC frameworks using such as Symfony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symfony - G-RaZoR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Could someone perhaps explain to me what are the benefits of Ruby on Rails, I mean just looking at that code has me scratching my head. I know some PHP and what not, but what exactly are the benefits of this compared to PHP?
Also, could someone provide a demo of this? - AlexApetrei, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1no, cats can not act as ferrets !
- majglow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Although I hate to drop any criticism on a RoR thread (big RoR fan here), I've used acts_as_ferret for some pretty high traffic projects, and it doesn't really scale too well. First off, this isn't a criticism against Ferret, which is a most excellent software package, but a criticism against using ferret with Rails. The default setup writes to an index on your server, so the index is server centric. What happens when you need to add an extra server to the mix? Also, Ferret is not 100% stable when it comes to reading from an index that is being written to from another process (fcgi or mongrel). The web apps that I've used acts_as_ferret with crash once a day because ferret seg faults.
There are work arounds for all this though. You can move ferret to a BackgroundRB process (but then you can't use acts_as_ferret I don't think). But that's a lot of work, and why would you want to do this when you could use something like HyperEstraier or tsearch2 with postgresql? - Temujin12, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I think that acts_as_ferret is a great plug in. It's a cinch to use and can be highly configurable. However, I don't think it is quite ready for production use as it has problems with updating its index files in a multi-process/multi-server environment (which is turning out to be the preferred scaling method for production Rails apps). To the maintainer's credit, though, this is a known issue and is currently being worked on. Once this concurrency issue is solved, acts_as_ferret will be my preferred search implementation for Rails apps.
- neuralcooker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Badass! Ferret looks like sweet little addition for just about any Rails app. Simple to use and powerful.
- gspederson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Too cool, finally someone I personally know has a post on Digg....way to go Gregg and Jason.
- LavaHot, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Man, until I read the subtext, I thought this was about how to use A ferret. How do you use a ferret?
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Also, all the PHP frameworks that try to be Rails suck in my opinion. Some are pretty good imitations, but they are just not Rails and PHP doesn't allow them to be. Stay away from the imitations and just use Rails if you have the choice. If you must use PHP, I think the Zend Framework has some pretty cool ideas behind it and would recommend that over other MVC frameworks such as Symfony or Cake. Qcodo is another cool one to look at.
- cmer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Guess I have to start a search engine startup now!
- 0siris, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1WTF 1800... Stop that
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