Posts tagged: RAILS

I won’t ask “why?” because I think it’s kind of neat – TrimPath Junction is an unabashed Javascript clone of Ruby on Rails that was released earlier this year. Requires a Javascript interpreter on your server of course. (For bonus points run it on a Javascript web server too.)

I have to admit that until looking at the Junction example code I had never realized that though Javascript has objects, it has no classes. That sent me off reading more about prototype-oriented languages (that Lua just keeps popping up).

The creator of Rails has a nice aphorism in his blog today about the ever-elusive general-purpose CMS:

The more expensive it is to create fresh software, the more appealing the mirage of generalization will appear.

Of course, many religious wars in software architecture (including the one between Rails and J2EE) seem to boil down to differing attitudes toward generalization, so maybe the apparent wisdom here is itself a mirage. But it rings true for me.

This is nifty – Locomotive, from Ryan Raaum, a complete Ruby on Rails environment in a self-contained 30MB bundle. And when I say complete, I mean complete: Locomotive contains not only Rails itself, but the Ruby interpreter, RubyGems, the LightTPD webserver with FastCGI, the SQLite database engine, bindings for MySQL and PostgreSQL (though not the server binaries, wisely), and all the other bits and pieces needed for turnkey Rails. There’s also an expanded version of the package with even more goodies. If you have an existing Rails installation, Locomotive will run politely alongside it without messing anything up.

The recent posting by Ben Bangert entitled “Best of breed Controllers for MVC web frameworks” is interesting reading. (Also see his followup with corrections.) Rather than trying to stage a showdown, he’s noting significant similarities between the controller styles in CherryPy, Myghty, Bricks, Aquarium, Ruby on Rails, and Django. The implication I take is that this (mostly independent) convergence might be telling us something about smart web application development.

The post is worth reading for the comment thread alone, with posts from core Zope, CherryPy, Django, and TurboGears developers (among others) and a great little discussion of the history of object publishing on the web.

Big Nerd Ranch, which became well known on the strengths of Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa training and writing, has a new offering in their “bootcamp” series: Ruby on Rails Bootcamp. It’s taught by Marcel Molina Jr., a longtime Rails contributor. Most of the stuff Big Nerd Ranch teaches has been around in one form or another for ten years or more; it says something that they are tackling something so relatively new. Another jump in mindshare for Rails.