[thelist] Ruby on Rails: why?

[Martin Burns]

On 14 Nov 2007, at 19:00, Paul Bennett wrote:

> Poor code? Bear in mind that most popular MVC frameworks are also  
> *very* popular open-source projects with many intelligent developers  
> not only extending but also securing and optimising the code, as  
> well as identifying and fixing bugs. Also some pretty high profile,  
> high traffic and high-load applications run on MVC frameworks (i.e.:  
> all of 37Signals stuff) so they've passed the production environment  
> test.

Welllll, yes and no.

As you'll see from testing URLs like:
http://www.basecamphq.com?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
(ie add that query string to a PHP site and it will normally return  
the Zend logo), there's a lot more reliance on PHP in production code  
than some of the RoR cheerleaders might admit.

And I've picked up a theme that the rapidly developed code from using  
the RoR scaffolding shouldn't be your final production code; it's   
almost functional proof of concept code that of course you should  
optimise.

But this isn't a fault of the generic MVC design pattern, which will  
save you vastly in terms of coding effort in both initial development  
and ongoing maintenance - money that can easily be ploughed into  
improved hardware if performance becomes an issue.

Still, some other MVC type frameworks that might be useful:

http://www.djangoproject.org (if you like your Python)
http://struts.apache.org/ (if you like your Java)
http://www.phpmvc.net/ (if you like your PHP)
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm (if you like your Java  
and your Flash/Flex)

Cheers
Martin

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