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RoR another hype ?

 
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If we look at the contents of RoR main website.
I watched the video Creating a weblog in 15 minutesin RoR site. Well.. Am I the only one who thinks that RoR is just another hype with bundled stuff ??
1. People who have been programming in .NET will really wont move to RoR.
2. If planned, I can also show a video showing creating a weblog in 5 minutes using .NET.
3. I guess RoR will mainly attracts people who have been programming in cgi php python but not J2EE or .NET people.
4. While i like this inbuilt testing features in RoR, both .NET and J2EE also have such tools. Only in the beginning its sucks to configure such testing tools in .NET and J2EE, but not forever.

Does being not fully from MAC/Unix family makes me to think like that ???
 
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Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
Am I the only one who thinks that RoR is just another hype with bundled stuff ?


No, you're not alone thinking that. Plenty of people would agree with your analysis.

Ruby on Rails most certainly is hype.

Having said that, I honestly believe its hype is not without reason. In other words, while there is some air in the hype, there's also a lot of solid ground beneath.

Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
1. People who have been programming in .NET will really wont move to RoR.


No, not all who've programmed in .NET will but some will. I believe the main reason for people not to move from .NET to RoR is two-fold. First of all, Ruby on Rails is not the ultimate panacea which will solve all computing problems in the world--it's just a web framework, after all. Second, there isn't enough Rails work at the moment for all .NET geeks to jump ship at once.

Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
2. If planned, I can also show a video showing creating a weblog in 5 minutes using .NET.


Really? Please do make such a video. It would certainly inspire a lot of developers out there to try .NET.

Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
3. I guess RoR will mainly attracts people who have been programming in cgi php python but not J2EE or .NET people.


I'd say that moving from CGI, PHP, or Python frameworks to Ruby on Rails is a more natural development than going from .NET or J2EE to Rails, but at the same time, the productivity difference for developing simple web applications between .NET/J2EE and Rails is so ridiculously big (at least the way I've seen most enterprises develop software) that I think it's likely that the .NET or J2EE developer has more motivation to make the move than the PHP programmer.

Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
4. While i like this inbuilt testing features in RoR, both .NET and J2EE also have such tools. Only in the beginning its sucks to configure such testing tools in .NET and J2EE, but not forever.


Again, this would be much more effective if we could see more of the good stuff in the form of concrete examples.
 
Balaji Loganathan
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Thanks for your reply.
I will soon try to comeup with .NET blog video.
 
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Originally posted by Balaji Loganathan:
Thanks for your reply.
I will soon try to comeup with .NET blog video.



I will be waiting for your video.
 
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1. People who have been programming in .NET will really wont move to RoR.



Please post the studies and data that support this. Perhaps you aren't convinced, but we have no idea whether or not you're representative.


2. If planned, I can also show a video showing creating a weblog in 5 minutes using .NET.



I don't think the point of any of this is making a weblog in 5 minutes. Doing projects like that without a framework doesn't take too long, either.

I think the real advantage of frameworks like RoR is the lift you get from standards and generating boilerplate code. I would expect that for a real project that a lot of the boilerplate would be tossed, especially in the UI layer. But what's wrong with having DAOs generated for you?


3. I guess RoR will mainly attracts people who have been programming in cgi php python but not J2EE or .NET people.



I use Java EE extensively, and I'm interested in RoR. More data, please.


4. While i like this inbuilt testing features in RoR, both .NET and J2EE also have such tools. Only in the beginning its sucks to configure such testing tools in .NET and J2EE, but not forever.



True. JUnit has been around for a long time in Java, and even .NET has seen the wisdom and ported it to NUnit. There are Ant/Nant tasks, too. The problem isn't so much configuration as writing the tests. I find programmers to be remarkably resistant.

I like the fact that RoR helps with both unit and functional tests. JUnit started with Java, but there needs to be far more of this, especially for functional tests.


Does being not fully from MAC/Unix family makes me to think like that???



No, you can't blame your thought processes on Mac or Unix.
 
Michael Duffy
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I'd also point out that Trails and Grails are Java EE analogs of RoR. If you don't want to pick up Ruby, try those.
 
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I like RoR but agree with Lasse that its limited because its only a framework suited for building web apps.

A lot of people seem to think that one technology is going to "change the world". What people don't understand is that there is no one single "silver bullet", that will save the day.

Whether or not RoR is better than Struts / Hibernate or .NET, is not the point. The point is that it helps formulate good ideas, which, in turn, innovates technologies. If there was no RoR there would be no Trails and Grails. Just like if there was no Java there would have been no C#, and if there was no C#, Java 5 wouldn't have the for/in feature (foreach in C#).

What learning different or new technologies does for me as a developer is that it helps me with understanding things such as architecture and good OO design.

Learning something like RoR will make one a better Java or C# developer (in my opinion). The key thing in software development is the ability to translate something hard you did in the past using a particular technology, but in an altered sense in the current technology that you are using... Make sense?

The only thing that bugs me about Ruby is the annoying "end" instead of the "}".

I do think that RoR is better for prototypes...

What concerns me about Ruby is what type of frameworks (other than web based) and tools (IDEs, Profilers, etc.) will be available for it and whether it'll have a strong support from companies such as IBM and Oracle, as Java has.

Just my two cents,
 
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