Ruby on Rails @ Oracle.com
Posted by Daniel Butler Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:18:00 GMT
Ruby on Rails has breached the walls at Oracle.com. In, Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial, technologist Richard Monson-Haefel describes the advantages and disadvantages of Using Ruby on Rails. His summary in “What is Ruby? What is Rails?” is particularly compelling:
What is Ruby? What is Rails?
Ruby is a dynamic programming language similar in many respects to Perl, Python, and Smalltalk, but it is its own animal. Java and PHP programmers seem to pick up the language pretty easily and they have been Ruby’s biggest supporters. But others have been attracted to the language, too; including Don Box, who is well known as one of the wonkiest-wonks of the Microsoft world. Ruby is not new; it was created in 1993, making it older than Java or PHP, both of which were first introduced to the public in 1995. So while Ruby is a mature language, it’s been less popular than some other languages. As a result, the ecosystem that surrounds the Ruby programming language is not as rich as those that have grown up around Java, PHP, or Perl. Consequently, you will find fewer frameworks, libraries, books, Web sites, blogs, and other resources dedicated to the language.
Mr. Monson-Haefel admits that things are about to change with Ruby.
The marketing impotence of the Ruby community changed recently, when David Heinemeier Hanson introduced the Rails framework, arguably the most popular application of Ruby in its history. Rails extends the Ruby programming language into a domain specific language especially well suited for web development. It also leverages ActiveRecord, another language extension that adapts Ruby to object-relational persistence. Other than Rails’ lack of support for compound primary keys and two-phase commit, its biggest obstacle to adoption has been that you need to learn a new programming language to use it. This is not something that most people can simply ignore with a lot of hand-waving; learning a new language can be a fun but daunting task.
Indeed, Alexa’s site statistics show that the flagship Ruby on Rails web site, rubyonrails.org, has seen significant growth in popularity over the last year:
We agree with his conclusion. In our 15 years in the industry, no programming language or framework we’ve encountered have been as satisfying or productive to work in as Ruby on Rails. He continues:
If, however, you were interested in expanding your resume, I can think of no other language I would recommend higher than Ruby. Ruby represents the culmination of 10 years of development without the tampering of commercial interests. As a result, Ruby is a delight to work with and, in many cases, is an order of magnitude more productive than Java, C, or Microsoft .NET languages. (The exception may be IronPython, a port of the Python language to the Microsoft .NET environment. Python, like Ruby, is a dynamic and productive programming language.)
