[GLLUG] Best Web/Desktop Programming solution (...)

[Jeremy Bowers]

Note, I'm not saying it sucks. I'm saying it's setting off alarm bells, 
and you just triggered a couple more.

> I wouldn't call Basecamp a small project by any stretch of the
> imagination.  And if you simply took their 'sound bites' alone, it
> would be difficult to come up with any other conclusion than that
> Rails is pretty beefy and production ready.

Alarm bell: Everyone keeps pointing at the same one project.

Not an alarm bell, but just in general: Sound bites are useless, 
*especially* coming from advocates. Application development with Mozilla 
has great soundbites too, but it empirically sucks.

> I am not sure what you mean by limiting,

A framework, almost by definition, functions by making some things 
easier at the cost of making some things harder. The term "impedance 
mismatch" comes from here; it's often used in the context of one 
programming framework, Object orientation, trying to hook up to a data 
framework, SQL, but the idea has general applicability. Based on the 
fact that I have only mostly seen

> I am a n00b programmer

n00b programmers singing the praises of Ruby on Rails, I am concerned 
that the people generating the hype are not sufficiently experienced to 
judge the tradeoffs.

I also find it highly likely that the primary advantage is simple that 
*it's written in Ruby*, which almost by default makes it much better 
than a Java app, but gives it no particular advantage over Python and 
not much over Perl. I also find that the criticisms people level against 
"other" apps when promoting Ruby on Rails don't apply to anything I 
actually use, just Java or Microsoft solutions. Again, alarm bells.

> , and I found Python to be difficult to
> understand due to some of its logic.   This is of course my opinion,
> it is not a cut on Python for its strengths (yes it has many).  I have
> just found Ruby in particular to make more sense and allow for
> programming (anything) to be fun.  Not to mention the ease of learning
> it.

I find it highly likely this is unusual. Explaining Ruby's habits of 
passing blocks around will be very difficult to most non-programmers. 
It's all easy and obvious, *after* you understand it, and it's all 
pretty easy and obvious to me too, now. But that's not normal.

It's good for you that you're finding this easy, because other than the 
syntax, Ruby promotes a lot of good programming features. But if I had 
to bet in a business which language non-programmers are going to do 
better with, I'd go with the one where that was one of the design criteria.

I'm not a n00b programmer. Everything I see about Ruby on Rails puts it 
on the "it'll probably be good in a couple of years, but it's advocates 
need to work with it a few more years until they start hitting the 
problems that other environments have had to deal with with scalabity, 
project size, integrating with other environments, performance, etc.; 
everyone loves it now because none of the advocates have hit the wall 
yet." Zope was there a couple of years ago, and it seems to have passed 
through it and is now the core of *many* large projects; no longer do 
you always get pointed at the same large project, over and over again. 
Sadly, of course, this is largely after its hype bubble came and went, 
but that's the way it tends to go; it is *extremely rare* for hype and 
power to peak at the same time. (Note Java only really became a 
plausible choice about two years after the hype died down, for instance.)

That said, try it, learn, run through the tutorial, unless you push the 
boundaries it'll probably mature before you hit them either.

But then I'm not sure it's a good solution for the original poster 
anyhow; I'm pretty sure there's no form designers for Ruby on Rails and 
from what I've seen the framework is oriented against forms-based 
solutions, which I **strongly** approve of in general (building 
interfaces from metadata is the way to go and the framework seems built 
on that), but the requisite tradeoffs probably do not play in the 
original poster's favor.