1:45 pm John Paul Ashenfelter - Rails for the Ruby-Impaired

John Paul gave an overview of why he thinks Ruby on Rails is good framework for web application development. One of the things about rails is that it includes as standard many things that we in the Fusebox world regard as extras.

Active Record for example provides similar facilities to Reactor does for CF application and is part of the standard Ruby on Rails installation. It works hard to make the database fairly invisible. For example changing from MySQL to MS SQL is completely painless.

The only task that has to be done in the DBMS is to create the database. Everything else is done in Rails.

There is built in support for caching, logging and security.

When installing Rails a very simple clean install package is available which combines all the features.

It has a collection of templates for use in creating views. Rhtml (Ruby), rxml, rjs(Ajax).

There is a built in vendor directory structure that allows each vendor to have a valid place to put files. There are a lot of cool plug-ins for rails. Streamline takes Rails scaffolding and bonds it with Google toolkit.

Capistrano is a built in deployment tool, which could be used with CF.

JRuby is a java version of Ruby. This could be a big competitor for ColdFusion, once Rails is able to run on JRuby.

Rails lessons:

• Best Practices all together in a single package.
  • Version Control
  • Deployment
  • ORM
  • Ajax
• Make the database invisible.
  • Transfer
  • Reactor
• Easy things should be easy.
• Testing is crucial, and should be easy.
  • Rails contains a test harness and can be run.

John Paul has implemented some of the Rails ideas in his ColdFusion Applications.

• Move to convention over configuration.
• Pick an ORNM and integrate it.
• Pick an Ajax Library and integrate it.
• Pick a test library and use it. (cfunit or cfcunit or selenium)
• Automate the generation of the XML files for the parts.

Book on JUnit can be used with cfcUnit and there is a good presentation on UGTV.

John Paul sugessts we choose a scripting language that we can run from the command line. Ant is a good way to run scripts but maybe Ruby is good choice for scripts too.