Will Ruby on Rails fly?

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Dec. 19, 2007

Ruby on Rails version 2.0 was announced two weeks ago and is meant for a developer base set on seeing the next good thing regarding the popular Web services development tool. Among some of the changes in Ruby on Rails 2.0 are enhanced security features and support for REST (Representational State Transfer).

Some industry observers are saying that this new release has already been incorporated in many of the MdLogix solution. MdLogix develops a clinical research management system based on Rails.

Some of the most useful features of Rails 2.0 for Mdlogix have been Partial Layouts, which reduce CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML duplication by allowing parts of Web pages to use common layouts, REST-ful Routing Updates, which allow "prettier" URLs for custom actions, Asset Caching, which provides new tags for compressing JavaScript easily, etc.

It also incorporates Initializers, which separate out custom configuration into separate initializer files, and Fixtures, which provide support for using fixture names in other fixture files to relate fixtures.

As important as what was added to Rails 2.0, is what was actually removed, some say. Earlier Rails support for pagination and form tags that were less successful than newer techniques have been removed from the Rails core, which should make it easier for newer Rails developers to follow best practices.

In a nutshell, Ruby on Rails 2.0 is a productive tool MdLogix has for developing simple-looking Web applications with advanced functionality.

Ola Bini, a London-based developer with ThoughtWorks and a contributor to Sun Microsystems' JRuby effort, said what he likes most about Rails 2.0 is that it has been "slimmed down" a bit.

Bini said "things like extracting most of the database adapters, and making it uniform how they're loaded from gems, makes it much easier to handle. Ruby on Rails 2.0 doesn't really include anything revolutionary for me. It's a lot of small things that makes life easier. Tasks that you could do before, but with a bit of pain—like HTTP authentication, that's just there now."

Bini was also quick to point out "we are engaged to build the Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Management System, and after experimenting with the usual suspects—J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition], .Net, MDA [model-driven architecture], PHP, ColdFusion—we found that only RoR provided the development speed of PHP or ColdFusion with the powerful functionality and maintainability of J2EE or .Net."

"Overall, the focus has been on application security, web services performance, profiling. Also, making it even easier to create cleaner Rails applications is a big plus. There are nice things that have been added and they will make our lives easier," said Bini.

Mike Subelsky, a freelance Web services developer said he also has been working with EdgeRails so he had been able to use Rails 2.0 before most users.

Bini said the indications he gets suggest that the Rails framework is simply getting more mature.

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Source: eWeek

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