Debating web development toolsets

[Christopher Browne]

On Jan 7, 2008 10:26 PM, Myles Braithwaite <myles-Ufssi81vwmMSKvlGVnxYRVaTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >> I believed in the marketing hype and it made me stupid. When ever I
> >> had to leave the
> >> RoR environment it took a day to get back up to speed.
> >
> > Is that good stupid or bad stupid?  Seriously, I've hit the same
> > thing going
> > from microcontroller code to C++ or Java a few times and back, and the
> > difference in mindset felt like shifting half a dozen gears.  If it
> > simply
> > makes life easier, then I'm all for it.
>
> Bad stupid. If you want to learn about web development stay far away
> from RoR.

100% agreed.

All reports I see are that RoR defines a data access model that pretty
much precludes any sort of "managed version migration."

> >> ASP.NET isn't really a language but a glorified template language you
> >> will have
> >> to use C#, J#, C++, IronPython, and VisualBasic. I gave a
> >> presentation
> >> on IronPython
> >> and ASP.NET at PyGTA a while ago:
> >> http://wiki.mylesbraithwaite.com/Presentations/2007/PyGTA-IronPython
> >
> > That's pretty cool, I didn't know you could use Python in ASP.  Not
> > quite a
> > reason to jump onto ASP, but neat nevertheless.
>
> >>> Python: Don't know much about python beyond Mailman.  Looks like a
> >>> decent
> >>> scripting language, can it do reports and interface mySQL well?
> >>
> >> Python is my favorite language of all time. I find it best for web
> >> development because
> >> of it's status. It can handle the enterprise-level apps and small
> >> websites.
> >
> > That's pretty much what I'm looking for: something that can start
> > small and
> > grow big, with solid support.  How well does it interface databases?
>
> Python has great support for databases.

Absolutely.  They've got APIs to pretty well any database you should
be considering.

> >> If you interested I would suggest taking a look at some web
> >> frameworks
> >> like Django,
> >> web.py, and TurboGears.
> >
> > TurboGears looks like it could be pretty good.  How does it compare
> > to RoR?
>
> I wouldn't compare TurboGears to RoR, Django is more like RoR.
> TurboGears is a
> package of some python software.
>
> >> It really matters what exactly you are developing. If you are
> >> developing a simple website
> >> i.e. a blog and some flatpages, I would suggest PHP or Perl. If you
> >> want a step high than that
> >> I would suggest RoR. If you are doing something a little more
> >> complicated I would suggest
> >> Python. If you have some money behind you Java and ASP.NET are the
> >> way
> >> to go.
> >
> > This suggests to me that I should look at RoR or Python.  I suppose
> > the
> > question becomes: which one does the better job of making database-
> > driven
> > sites and reporting easiest, since that will be the bulk of the
> > sites I work
> > with.
>
> Python is more mature language so it might have more support for
> databases.
>
> For a database-driven site I would suggest steering away from RoR and
> move
> towards Python. How skilled are you in SQL? If you have been doing it
> for years
> then you might want to move fully away from RoR. If you don't know
> allot of SQL
> and it is your biggest handicap (like me) I would suggest a Web
> Framework
> like RoR, Django, TurboGears, etc.

For a really different view on things, I'd suggest taking a peek at
the Andromeda Project.

http://www.andromeda-project.org/

I'm not sure how usable it is, at this point; the notion of it is to
have a large portion of the code that you write represent declarations
describing business rules, as opposed to the frequent alternatives of:

 a) Business rules being defined in an ad-hoc fashion mixed in with
GUI widget code

      (One might think this couldn't scale; the Germans have gotten it
to, as that's how SAP R/3 was implemented...)

 b)  Business rules being defined within a "business layer API" which
may or may not always actually get used

 c)  As declarations in the DBMS

Somehow, the notion of starting out by implementing in PHP doesn't
fill me with confidence in the likely results, but I'd rather see more
experiments like Andromeda out there; people might learn something
from them...

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