On Mar 29, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Kenneth Downs wrote:

> I am fascinated by your post. I have never heard a bad thing said
> about RoR.

Most of what you read about RoR is written from a very superficial
view of what it promises, as tainted by the simplistic uses of mysql
people are familiar with.

Last summer at the O'Reilly OSCON, the author of RoR gave a
presentation. My colleagues and I just sat there stunned at how one
of the great features of RoR he was showing off was basically
referential integrity. Except that you were *only* allowed to access
the DB using the RoR tools. No direct connections were ever
allowed. He brushed off any comments about that as "I consider the
DB to be just a dumb object store". So why bother using an SQL
engine then? Silly.

That was the end of us even bothering to investigate it as a serious
platform, though we have borrowed some of the ideas and concepts in
our own in-house platform we have built since then.

My take on RoR is that it makes the simple things simpler (kind of
how the Daily Show is now Dailier) and the moderate to hard things
impossible. If you have a simple project then by all means use it to
full advantage. But if you have complex data models then
fugeddaboutit. :-(


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On Mar 29, 2006, at 12:33 PM, Steve Atkins wrote:

> For the original poster - a web interface might well be the
> simplest to put together,
> but if a client turns out to be a better solution I'd strongly
> suggest looking at Qt.
> It has nice SQL support and it's very quick to turn around a simple
> database

There's also XUL built into Mozilla derived browsers if you want a
middle-ground to full custom app and web app.


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Ian Harding wrote:
> ...
> works fine, but you have to do it "The Rails Way" and expect no help
> from the "Community" because they are a fanboi cheerleader squad, not
> interested in silly stuff like referential integrity, functions,
> triggers, etc. All that nonsense belongs in the application!


You exaggerate. There's nothing that says you need to only
use ActiveRecord's out-of-the-box configuration with rails apps.

All of our models directly use their postgresql library which
is just a wrapper around libpq; and from there you can use whatever
postgresql specific tricks you'd like (postgis types was the main
reason we used that instead of ActiveRecord).

> Check this out, there is no stale connection detection or handling in
> rails. I'm not kidding. If you connection drops out, restart your
> web server. Sorry. Blah.

Which is a reasonable default. If you want to catch the
exception and re-set the connection, you surely can do so.

We prefer to catch the exception and make the machine take
itself out of the load-balancing pool so we can diagnose
the problem rather than trying to automatically do (whatever
it is you expected it to do).


We're drifting way off topic so I'll stop here. I'd be happy
to discuss further via email or on the rails lists.

Bernhard Weisshuhn wrote:

> Kenneth Downs wrote:
>
>> I have been meaning to investigate it because it is the only system
>> I've heard of that makes the same claim that I do, which is to have
>> eliminated entire categories of labor through automation.
>
>
> Have you looked at http://catalyst.perl.org/ lately?
> IMHO it's "Rails done right" and it's perl, so it just /has/ to be
> good ;-)
>
> sorry, couldn't resist.
> bkw
>
>
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Just had a look and it seems rather interesting! I had a soft spot for
perl since it was my first "proper" programing language (I learnt
pascal when I was 8 but never did anything more than four or five part
pick a path adventures ^_^).

Thanks

--
Rory Hart

Lifestyle Management Consultant

Professional Lifestyle Management
http://www.lifestylemanage.com

Phone 03 9879 5643 PO Box 4179
Fax 03 9879 6743 Ringwood Vic 3134
Mobile 0412 821030 Australia


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Thanks for all the suggestions I now have a lot better idea of my
options. It is nice to fire off a question at a mailing list and get so
many positive helpful answers, gives me a warm and fuzzy glow.

Thank you all

--
Rory Hart

Lifestyle Management Consultant

Professional Lifestyle Management
http://www.lifestylemanage.com

Phone 03 9879 5643 PO Box 4179
Fax 03 9879 6743 Ringwood Vic 3134
Mobile 0412 821030 Australia


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Ian Harding wrote:
>>>> I'm wondering if I could get some suggestions as to how implement
>>>> this quickly and simply? I was thinking a web interface using PHP
>>>> would be the fastest way of going about it.
>>>>
>
> If you used Ruby on Rails, you'd be finished by now. It slices, it
> dices, it makes julienne fries.
>
> Seriously, it's not too bad if you don't mind it's plentiful
> shortcomings. I was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from typing
> <scripting language> pages so I switched to RoR for a hobby app. It
> works fine, but you have to do it "The Rails Way" and expect no help
> from the "Community" because they are a fanboi cheerleader squad, not
> interested in silly stuff like referential integrity, functions,
> triggers, etc. All that nonsense belongs in the application!
>
> Check this out, there is no stale connection detection or handling in
> rails. I'm not kidding. If you connection drops out, restart your
> web server. Sorry. Blah.
>
> Anyway, besides its warts, it is dead easy to use, and does make
> putting together web applications in a "green field" scenario quite
> painless. Just don't try to do anything outside the box like trying
> to access an existing database that uses RDBMS features heavily and
> uses normal object naming.
>
> - Ian
>
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>
re: ruby && postgres -- i'll throw nitro and og into the hat.
http://nitrohq.com
nitro is the web presentation framework, Og is the ORM...
----------------------------------------------
require 'og'

class Comment
property :title, String, :sql => 'VARCHAR(60) NOT NULL'
property :body, String
property :author, String
property :create_time, Time
def initialize( title = '', body = '', author = '', time = Time.now )
@title = title
@body = body
@author = author
@create_time = time
end
end

og_psql = {
:destroy_tables => true, # don't use this on a DB with tables that
you DO NOT want to lose -- or set to false
:store => sql,
:user => 'rthompso',
assword => 'rthompso',
:name => 'test'
}

#Og.table_prefix = '' # remove og generated table prefix
db = Og.setup(og_psql)
c = Comment.new('Title', 'Body', 'Author')
# or
# c = Comment.new
# c.title = 'Hello'
# c.body = 'World'
# c.create_time = Time.now
# c.author = 'tml'
c.save

------------------------------
$ ruby -rubygems pgtest.rb
I, [2006-03-29T20:16:50.278205 #16029] INFO -- : Og uses the Psql store.
D, [2006-03-29T20:16:50.637238 #16029] DEBUG -- : Dropped database table
ogcomment
I, [2006-03-29T20:16:50.943499 #16029] INFO -- : Created table 'ogcomment'.
D, [2006-03-29T20:16:50.963087 #16029] DEBUG -- : PostgreSQL processing
foreign key constraints
D, [2006-03-29T20:16:50.963532 #16029] DEBUG -- : PostgreSQL finished
setting constraints. No action was taken in 0.00 seconds.
rthompso@yos:/home/rthompso>
$ psql test -c "select * from ogcomment;"
title | body | author | create_time | oid
-------+------+--------+---------------------+-----
Title | Body | Author | 2006-03-29 20:16:50 | 1
(1 row)

$ psql test -c "\d ogcomment;"
Table "public.ogcomment"
Column | Type |
Modifiers
-------------+-----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------------
title | character varying(60) | not null
body | text |
author | text |
create_time | timestamp without time zone |
oid | integer | not null default
nextval('ogcomment_oid_seq'::regclass)
Indexes:
"ogcomment_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (oid)








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