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. :-(
