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20041025 Monday October 25, 2004

Rails - the MVC Framework for Ruby When I first saw the quick setup for Rails video, I dismissed it as a something simple that wasn't that cool. Thanks to Dion's post, I decided to watch it again. Then I realized why it looked so simple the first time - the video kept looping and all I saw was the Apache setup part - I didn't see the whole video. After watching the video this morning, it's enough to make me want to become a Ruby developer and use Rails to develop my next webapp. Then again, Ruby probably doesn't pay the bills nearly as well. The upside is it looks like it would actually run fast on OS X instead of the dog-slow Ant/Tomcat/Eclipse/IDEA combination.

Hopefully I'll get to learn more about Rails at Denver's upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff. It looks like Dave has added it to his repertoire. I wonder if Rails has support for using the Copeland IoC container? Posted in Java at Oct 25 2004, 03:19:00 PM MDT 9 Comments

Comments:

needle (http://needle.rubyforge.org/) is the new thing now. jamies said that he will focus on that from now on, instead of copland. then again though IoC is not as critical and needed as in all the java apps. what kinda stuff would you need it for?

Posted by Florian Weber on October 25, 2004 at 04:11 PM MDT #

Jamis Buck, the developer of both Copland and Needle, is actually doing Rails development now. He has even signed up for a number of patches for the coming 0.9 release including trying to figure out how Needle could play a part in Rails. Regarding the bills, I'll repeat my belief that customers often times are only superficially interested in buzzword compliance while there's a deep interest in getting working software for less resources. I'd wager that it shouldn't be hard to demonstrate the later with Rails. Make a challenge out of it. Say you'll develop on Rails for a week and if they like the results at the end of that iteration, you can go on to try another one. If you decide that Rails wasn't it, you can think of it as pseudo code for a J2EE app. Or as a spike. There are many ways to get customers on Rails if you're interested.

Posted by David Heinemeier Hansson on October 26, 2004 at 02:52 AM MDT #

So is Rails the "Struts" of the Ruby world? Seems kinda neat, but what PHB is going to OK such a project. I like what I saw though, hopefully Ruby and Rails will catch on...

Posted by Ben C on October 26, 2004 at 08:16 AM MDT #

To me, Rails seems more like the "AppFuse" of the Ruby world. It makes setting up projects easy and does the whole ball of wax - from persistence to the UI. I'm guessing it supports test-first development too. Or maybe it's so simple it doesn't need it?

Posted by Matt Raible on October 26, 2004 at 08:49 AM MDT #

Matt - You should follow the lead and do a video of setting up a simple app using AppFuse :) D

Posted by Dion Almaer on October 26, 2004 at 10:46 AM MDT #

Rails is very much like AppFuse in that it's an setup for using Action Pack (controller + view) and Active Record (ORM). All of the packages were designed to work together, though. So even though they're loosely coupled, the APIs were designed with each other in mind, which makes for a much more pleasant and integrated experience. I'd like to take pretty strong offence to the "Struts of Ruby world". Actually, the home page has a nice jab at that: "Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuration files." Please do give it a look. And regarding PHB's, you might be interested in reading my view on those: Fear-driven technology choices

Posted by David Heinemeier Hansson on October 26, 2004 at 05:24 PM MDT #

After watching the setup video, Rails looked so easy that I just had to try it. That has got to be the easiest framework I have ever seen. I just learned a little bit about Ruby tonight and already I can build functional applications. The greatest part is speed. Just make a change, save it, and refresh. By the way, the TextMate editor used in the setup video is one of the greatest text editors for Mac OS X. It's almost like an IDE, but 10 times faster and simpler.

Posted by Matt Moriarity on October 26, 2004 at 08:08 PM MDT #

If you think Rails is cool, check out SeaSide.

Posted by 217.150.124.12 on November 02, 2004 at 12:00 PM MST #

Rails are way to cool. It just seems so easy to do pretty much anything. I just hope the project goes well!

Posted by Website on January 14, 2005 at 06:10 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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