Seaside/Squeak, Ruby

[Sy Ali]

On 1/20/06, Yanni Chiu <yanni-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Applications almost always get tricky at a certain level of
> complexity. What I want to know is how Ruby/Rails can let
> you stray from the norm.

This is an interesting thing to ask.  I know that Rails is widely
touted as being wonderful because it sets everything up for you and
makes it easy to whip things up.  However, I asked the right people
the right questions and the long-term verdict is that in the long run
when you really want to do "screwy things" you do end up implementing
things on your own.

I'm not a developer myself, so I can't really go into detail. 
However, the one thing I understand is that the very core of Ruby is
dynamically rewritable by a programmer.  So if they don't like the
fundamental way "print" works, they can step inside and goof around. 
With this in mind, some really spectacularly hackish things can be
done.  This is, of course, where maintainability falls flat.. there's
not much chance to pass your code off to someone else if you've done
some fundamental fiddling.  =)

Rails is still a bunch of handy things on top of Ruby.  It's still
very possible to do everything in Ruby.. or to take only part of the
Rails framework and use just that part.

While lots of people will shout "rails is good!" it's just one of a
number of Ruby toolkits that do that sort of job, albiet it's by far
the most popular these days.  Once that first book gets written,
things change..

For serious discussion, you're probably best to start a theory-thread
on the ruby-talk mailing list[1].  Or if you'd like to ask some locals
you can either sign up to the Toronto Ruby Users Group mailing list[2]
or drop by LinuxCaffe on Sunday Febuary 5th for the next TRUG meeting.

All in all.. at the last meeting I sat down and watched the seaside
videos.  If it weren't for the childishly-awkward interface (thanks to
squeak?) I would take it _very_ seriously.

[1] http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020104.html
[2] http://www.trug.ca/Mailing_list
[3] http://linuxcaffe.com/
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