Anyone try Ruby on Rails?

[rpanning]

Ok, I know a few people here have tried Ruby already. I was just wandering what you think about it? The good, bad, and ugly. I'm realy considering learning it. Or, is there a good alternate to PHP? Not .NET, something that is crossplatform.

Rant: After reading the PHP internals for a while I realized what caos is going on under PHP development. It just seems like it isn't organized very well. PHP 6 should be a major overhaul IMO with full use of Exceptions and consolidate function names, like some str_* and array_* are already. Better yet, put them in Classes/Namespaces as static methods Array::Sort(); Ok, ok, enough. END RANT

[pjleonhardt]

if you want to stick with PHP based, which after re-reading your post is sounds like you're trying to get away from, check out https://trac.cakephp.org/

It's sort of like rails for php.

I tried to learn rails for a little bit, but I don't know ruby, so It wasn't very successful. I plan on giving it another shot in the future when I've got some extra free time.

[Elizabeth]

I do like Rails, but like pj, I haven't had enough time to devote to it. :glare:

[vaaaska]

People are sure talking about Python alot. Understanding how to use Ajax really well I think is a good move. Stay away from the frameworks...bleh...

Ruby is Ruby. It will take longer for Ruby to get a mainstream vibe than it has for PHP to get to where it is today. Just my take on it...

[Jason Batten]

Ruby's hype is riding on rails ;)

[rpanning]

Thanks for the feedback. Another question, can you easily program in Ruby with a 3-tier design? (Interface - Process - Data) With a PHP system it kinda looks like:

HTML - PHP - mySQL

What I am looking for is a system that can do both an HTML interface and a GUI. From what I understand it would be something like:

Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.com/) - Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/) - mySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) (Web Based Interface [For Users])
FXRuby (http://www.fxruby.org/)/FOX (http://www.fox-toolkit.com/) - Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/) - mySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) (GUI for Windows, ect. [For Administration])

Do you think this is possible or a viable solution? Maybe I should be asking this at some Ruby forum.?.? Thanks again.

[Jason Batten]

Why are you running away from PHP? What do you see wrong with PHP?

[Weedpacket]

I'm sure it is possible; and just as viable with Ruby as it would be with PHP, Java, or Perl. The whole point of having separate tiers is that the different layers don't need to know how the others are implemented.

[vaaaska]

There are some good Ruby demo movies out there that show how to do things (I don't feel like Googling it right now - Scott Clark posted something in the article/news section not too long ago).

From what I've gleened, not having really done anything in Ruby, it's quick to do simple things. But, if you need a great deal of complexity it's going to be just like anything else (it will take time and understanding). Ruby is not going to simply make things easy...

[pjleonhardt]

just remember ruby != ruby on rails

Rails is an additional framework that is implemented on top of ruby. To do everything in ruby wouldn't have much, if any, bonuses over PHP. Doing it in rails is where the rapid development comes in, as it will take care of certain things for you (eventhandling, database interaction, etc.)

[Jason Batten]

Soon people will be so lazy all you'll have to do is use Macromedia WebSpeak to fart out a web site with voice commands. It won't be who can type the quickest, who can put together other peoples code the quickest, it will be who can speak the quickest.


Note: macromedia webspeak is a fictional program, I am sure it will happen one day then I will sue for taking my fictional name, then due to forum privacy I will be screwed and loose money in a pointless court battle. My children will have to become a travelling circus act to support my drug habbits and my one legged wife with webbed hands will be as useless as she sounds.

[dasil003]

Why are you running away from PHP? What do you see wrong with PHP?

Unicode Support (http://www.acko.net/blog/unicode-in-php) specifically, more generally lack of central vision for PHP (it grew organically), poor object orientation (having to use $this-> a million times in PHP 4), brainless configuration options that we will have to deal with forever if we want to write portable code (magic_quotes), no standard parameter ordering (strstr (http://us3.php.net/strstr) vs str_replace (http://us3.php.net/str_replace)), weak typing (how many bugs are caused by programmer's unawareness of the conversion rules between booleans, ints, strings, arrays, etc).

Don't get me wrong, I've worked primarily in PHP for 6 years now, and it is a wonderful language for getting things done. It has functions for nearly everything you could possibly want, and it is ubiquitous on shared web hosts. That said, it's not an elegantly designed or implemented language. PHP 5 makes a lot of improvements, but ultimately they are stuck supporting flawed ideas from 10 years ago for backwards-compatibility.

Ruby on the other hand suffers from having a much smaller userbase, and thus less support for various libraries that are needed for specific purposes. That is no small hurdle if you need some specific functionality. Also, Ruby suffers from being quite a bit slower than PHP. On the other hand Ruby's vision is brilliantly elegant, borrowing the best features from numerous programming languages and wrapping them into a cohesive package that's truly a joy to use.

After trying to use Perl for web application development back in the day, PHP was a breath of fresh air. Now after years of using PHP and becomingly intimately aware of its shortcomings, Ruby is giving me that same feeling. If you're not well-versed in functional programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming) or haven't programmed in a wide variety of languages much of Ruby's beauty is likely to escape you at first. However, if you're serious about becoming a better programmer, exposure to Ruby (or at least Python) is a very good idea.

[rpanning]

dasil003 sums it up. I highly agree with all of his views. PHP IS stuck in this backward compatibility thing (read the internals) which realy does limit things. They don't implement things because it'll break some people's code. That is a stupid idea which will stop PHP from having many significant improvements.

Don't get me wrong either, I like PHP and will continue to use it. The new system I'm planning right now will be based on PHP. I like PHP's syntax over any other language too, unlike some other people. It just started to bug me once I started reading the internals, chaos, just chaos. I know it's open source and all but they need to get their $itt together.

Oh I know this is asking for a fight, and I'm not looking to start one. These are just my current views of PHP. I hope they will change in the future, maybe PHP 6 will be even better than 5. Arg, it just bugs me.
------------------------------------------------------------

vaaaska, I've been checking out some of those vids and got a couple books on Ruby and Rails. I think it'll be fun learning this, some of the syntax scares me though. It's so much different than PHP.

Weedpacket, good point, it should be possible eitherway.

pjleonhardt, got it. It would be kinda nice to have a few things created for you. I'll see how it goes.

NetNerd85, funny but true. I'm sure some day it'll be to the point where we just have to think it. Not in my life time but that'd be crazy.

So, I'm gonna see how things go with the books and report back in a while. If anyone has any more input feel free to add it. I'm always open to comments, etc.

[(RL)Ian]

Ok, I know a few people here have tried Ruby already. I was just wandering what you think about it? The good, bad, and ugly. I'm realy considering learning it. Or, is there a good alternate to PHP? Not .NET, something that is crossplatform.

Rant: After reading the PHP internals for a while I realized what caos is going on under PHP development. It just seems like it isn't organized very well. PHP 6 should be a major overhaul IMO with full use of Exceptions and consolidate function names, like some str_* and array_* are already. Better yet, put them in Classes/Namespaces as static methods Array::Sort(); Ok, ok, enough. END RANT

Rails is cool. I'm a fan of how elegant it is. The syntax is different but its a very fun programming language. If you want to stick with PHP, however, pj is right to say that Cake (http://cakephp.org) is probably the closest thing out there (although its nowhere near stable yet).

Just a note on your rant: The chaos you speak of is the beauty of PHP. There is no set framework, so people do the same thing 100 different ways (most of which are crap). But don't confuse PHP with Rails. Rails runs on the Ruby language, which is just as open and chaotic as PHP. The Framework is just a program that runs on top of it to organize it. So Cake for PHP is the same as Rails for Ruby.

[Jason Batten]

End of the day for my personal experience I am still a noob, therefore to have undeveloped programming wings and wanting to leave the nest would be unwise. For me, PHP is still some what exciting although the language-boundries are only getting closer.

[(RL)Ian]

End of the day for my personal experience I am still a noob, therefore to have undeveloped programming wings and wanting to leave the nest would be unwise. For me, PHP is still some what exciting although the language-boundries are only getting closer.

Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. You can do anything in PHP that you can do in Rails or just about anything else (with a few notable exceptions). So, just do what comes easiest and is most fun for you :)

[francoisz]

Alternatively, you should try symfony, which is inspired by Mojavi and Rails, written in PHP5, and brings almost everything you could desire from a web application framework
http://www.symfony-project.com

[vaaaska]

Alternatively, you should try symfony, which is inspired by Mojavi and Rails, written in PHP5, and brings almost everything you could desire from a web application framework
http://www.symfony-project.com

Oh yeah, another framework. Where do I buy the manual?

3 posts and they are all about the framework.

[Jason Batten]

Shut up vaaaska it looks good and it's free :)

[(RL)Ian]

Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. You can do anything in PHP that you can do in Rails or just about anything else (with a few notable exceptions). So, just do what comes easiest and is most fun for you :)

I like symfony. I've been using it a lot lately.