Ruby, PHP, and the others.

Tags:

RoR is the abbreviation of Ruby on the Rail whilch targets a rapid application development framework. Ruby is the langauge proposed by a japanese, and its philosophy is said to be based on Principle of Least Surprise (POLS). It seems that the language is more popular than python/php in Japan.

You can see the demo of RoR here. And that demo reminds me of the time when I first saw the .NET demo.

To me, RoR seems to be a huge collection of templates which makes development more faster and faster. Another interesting thing in RoR is that the apps doesn’t seem to have any model in it. Actually, there’s one; in the database. Automatic OR mapper does whole chores requried for generating models. Automatic model generation is not unique work of Ruby. Some of you knows that ADO.NET and JDO also provides automatic mapping capabilities: Class < -> XML < -> DB Schema. But, taking those classes *always* as models in the web apps seem to be original.

Another interesting asepct of RoR is that it provides lots of AJAX templates. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CODE JAVASCRIPT in RoR. Similar frameworks are being done currently, so I treat this as anything.

Folks in PHP realm are doing something actually. Symfony is a open source framework for PHP5. There’s another framework called cakephp.

I believe PHP is far more promising than Ruby in Web 2.0 world because of the things already done nicely (e.g., Zend), and the number of people who knows PHP (though lots of them do not know what PHP really is; hey, it’s OO language). Anyway, there’s a demo of Symfony.

I’d also like to mention disputes about performance/development time comparison of frameworks. Here’s the performance comparison between JAVA and RoR. In the article, he says that implementation time comparison is bogus. Secondly, but more importantly, the web server used was Tomcat which renders all the numbers useless. Tomcat is famous. Tomecat is representative JSR RI. However, amost all professionals of JAVA lang. do know that the webserver’s performance is not good enough. That’s why APACHE is always used together.

Things surrounding RoR might be hype; it also might be true. Whatever the future, RoR teaches us three important lessons:

(1) Database table itself is a model for apps.
(2) Large set of templates actually helps.
(3) Script languages rolls.

Comments are welcome, but should be in English.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *