Re: Implementation Suggestions

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. :-(