Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks) [LWN.net]

Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks)

Posted Oct 19, 2006 9:55 UTC (Thu) by Jaffa (guest, #4327)
Parent article: Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? (developerWorks)

Grails is an interesting Java-based version of Rails using Groovy as the language rather than Ruby.

Although it's not yet as mature as Rails it has some interesting advantages:

Code defines database rather than vice-versa
Deployment is trivial, producing a WAR file you can put in your normal J2EE application server (e.g. Tomcat)
Integrate with existing Java classes and libraries (although this is possible with JRuby too)
Faster execution on mature, JIT-based VMs.

Groovy as a language is fairly mature and a nice hybrid of a "pure" dynamic language and Java syntax.

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Javafied Ruby-On-Rails

Posted Oct 30, 2006 1:19 UTC (Mon) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

> Code defines database rather than vice-versa

Ack, please, no. I thought if there was one lesson we'd learnt in the last half-century of programming, it's that data structures are easier to understand than code structures. As Fred Brooks said about thirty years ago:

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious."

(For "flowcharts" substitute "code"; back then flowcharts were commonly considered to be somehow easier to understand than actual code, which was nonsense.)