Alot of people started using blogs as a slightly better media for technical information, but it's becomming evident that with subjects ruby on rails, and some of MS astroturfing with marketing material, that blog aggregators like
Artima have been abused heavily with rather second rate blogging, about 3rd rate tools.
While ruby on rails is probably a good tool, it fails in a huge part from the flawed thinking that one provider can deliver a complete solution. It took me a long while to realize that attempting the complete toolkit that ror promises is often fruitless. It rarely delivers much beyhond the intial demostratable examples. What normally happens is that in designing for a single solution (A super fast web interface to databases), you often end up with libraries that are rather poor for generic usage.
The fact that PHP already has 3 or 4 projects that are based on PEAR, that deliver pretty much the same solution as ror. Indicates that the concept of small flexible libraries, maintained by seperate individuals, rather than one super mega project is always more valuable, although I guess you miss out on the hype more.
Comments
half agreed
I agree that some blog aggregators seem to be hijacked from time to time.
It is the case with RoR, as it was with CEP, with BottomFeeder, Savant, Groovy, Heron.
David HH had the bad, imo, idea of adding weblog.rubyonrails.com to the artima buzz wich imho should not be there.
But I came to the conclusion that this is quite obvious: every developer normally talks about its stuff, and when some other bloggers start talking about it you see a storm of messages. This normally goes by in a little time, thanks god.
OTOH, I disagree that "the concept of small flexible libraries, maintained by seperate individuals, rather than one super mega project is always more valuable".
There are plenty of this "only one thing package" in every community, be it java or python or php or ruby or perl or tcl.
But having them provided all togheter and nicely integrated is a great advantage that must not be underestimated, cause you have the chance to achieve better integration, to have a single point of reference and so on.
Btw, the various part of rails are usable independently of the others, IIRC.
Ah
I use DB DataObject day in and day out. I somehow stumbled on a video of the first Rails presentation by dhh, and was very impressed. Later I begged, and got to use rails before it was released to public, and was without even documentation. I've done my biggest projects since then in Rails. It works pretty well.
I think the reason they have pulled off the very difficult task of making a "complete toolkit", is the fanatical chase after elegance. The ruby language allows the framework designers to pull some real stunts behind the scenes, but make very clear apis.
It's worth at least downloading and playing with.
Hype is not all bad ...
I just discovered Ruby on Rails thanks to the /. news, probably like many others.
And thanks to this hype surrounding ROR at the moment I am slowly teaching myself Ruby.
Ruby seems absolutely wonderful. ROR is not a "perfect solution" as there are none, but it seems that it would allow me to get rid of small to medium jobs in no time.
This all seems very valuable to me and much worth the hype.
I like all-in-one solutions when what I need to do corresponds to what the solution does perfectly.
If I need to do something more custom, I would like to use and reuse well-maintained, independent packages as you said. And Ruby and ROR actually provide me with that.
I'm thinking more and more I'll soon be very thankful for the hype currently surrounding ROR !
Hijacked?
Isn't that what they are there for?
Part of what is cool about Artima, and content syndication in general, is that it gives marketing and publicity tools to the masses at a low cost. This is part of the dream of the web.
How is blogging RoR (or CEP) any different from Microsoft having a press conference on .NET? Without announcements and a little hype there is no way to gain early-adopters to gain feedback to gain maturity and stability to gain adoption to gain feedback...
I see posts on Artima about DBDO. Does that apply to what you are saying?
I think it is a good thing. Marketing is an important skill, and obviously it works. there hasn't been a CEP announcement in a while (though the dev team has been growing and working hard), yet it is still fresh enough in varbat's mind to mention in this thread.
-Jackson
P.S. CEP is being fully ported to PHP5 and is cleaning up alot in the process. I am sure you will see more on Artima and elsewhere in the not-to-distant future.
My Own Boss
Let me see if I understand you:
1. You haven't used Ruby on Rails.
2. You thought about doing something like it once, but decided you couldn't.
3. Therefore, RoR must suck.
???
