Brennan’s Blog

My co-workers at SpiderLogic started an email discussion about Bruce Tate showing up here and there and discussing Agile as well as Ruby on Rails which seems to be heating up. It seems my co-workers have not been watching this as closely as I have.

I have been disappointed with Java and JSF/Shale and it seems to me that R on R is feeding a sort of revival of ideas and excitement about what can be done with web applications. And the buzz around Ajax also compliments R on R as they are both closely related...

One of my co-workers wrote that R on R is not terribly Object-Oriented, but in my dealings with Ruby scripters in the past I know they are aggressively Object-Oriented, perhaps out of disdain for Perl being a half breed of procedural and OO code. Look at the modules on CPAN in detail and you will know what I mean.

Below is my contribution to our email discussion.

I would not say that Ruby is not very Object-oriented. In fact, OO is the foundation for the language. In contrast Perl is a half breed which does OO and procedural programming while Ruby enforces the OO discipline.

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html

And Ruby on Rails makes heavy use of object reflection to determine the configuration and behavior of the object. This eliminates the need for all of those XML files which clutter up Struts/JSP and Shale/JSF. Bruce Tate got David Geary to look into R on R in more detail and he is now looking to apply the ideas in R on R to Shale and JSF. He has been mentioning how R on R is influencing JSF/Shale development on his blog. It looks promising.

http://jroller.com/page/dgeary

I watched a video demonstration of R on R a few weeks ago and it was very impressive. It showed an editor which was pointed directly at a database table. Based on the type of the column it would provide the proper interface and validation. Like an integer is checked to actually be an integer. And a Varchar(50) would enforce the max length. That follows the idea of using reflection to determine the configuration instead of a secondary layer in XML to redescribe what the system already knows.

It looks like many Java developers (like Bruce Tate and Dave Thomas) are jumping ship and heading to Ruby. And Dave Thomas should have his new book on Ruby coming out this summer. That may accelerate the trend. And I would predict it will also draw some ASP.NET developers as well.

I personally view it as a research effort which will eventually benefit ASP.NET and JSF in the long run. Those developers will be back.