Ruby on Rails Hype

Well, in the vein of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” there are four Rails-like implementations in other languages that I know of — and I haven’t been looking.

Castle Project works on .Net with Ajax support.

Cake is a Rails-like framework for PHP, and Biscuit is another.

Lest the Java folks feel left out, there’s also Trails.

Speaking of Java and Rails, I was talking with a coworker today about RoR and why I thought it was cool. He asked if I’d seen Trails. Well, I haven’t “seen” it, I just know that it exists. I’m sure it’s very cool.

I mentioned, though, that one of the things I liked about RoR was some of the implicit definitions. For example:

@submission = Submission.findby_marketidandmanuscriptid(params[:marketid], params[:manuscript_id])

I didn’t have to create the function findby_marketidandmanuscript_id — it’s implied. That’s what I like about RoR: the power of implication.

My coworker pointed out that you could write a function in Java, yada yada yada. Yeah, but the point is that you don’t write one in RoR. Same thing for setters and getters. For setters and getters:

attraccessor :firstname, :lastname, :homeph

For getters only:

attrreader :firstname, :lastname, :homeph

Done.

• webdev

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