

Subject: [ANN] Rails 0.5.0: The end of vaporware!

From: David Heinemeier Hansson <david@ u h k g o

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 04:43:00 +0900

I?ve been talking (and hyping) Rails for so long that it?s all wierd to finally have it out in the open. Mind you, we?re still not talking about a 1.0 release, but the package currently on offer is still something I?m very comfortable to share with the world. Undoubtedly, there could be more documentation and more examples, but Real Artists Ship and this piece will grow in public. Enjoy Rails! Documentation, download: http://www.rubyonrails.org What is Rails? ============== Rails is a open source web-application framework for Ruby. It ships with an answer for every letter in MVC: Action Pack for the Controller and View, Active Record for the Model. Everything needed to build real-world applications in less lines of code than other frameworks spend setting up their XML configuraion files. Like Basecamp, which was launched after 4 KLOCs and two months of developement by a single programmer. Being a full-stack framework means that all layers are built to work seemlessly together. That way you Don?t Repeat Yourself (DRY) and you can use a single language from top to bottom. Everything from templates to control flow to business logic is written in Ruby?the language of love for industry heavy-weights In striving for DRY compliance, Rails shuns configuration files and annotations in favor of reflection and run-time extensions. This means the end of XML files telling a story that has already been told in code. It means no compilation phase: Make a change, see it work. Meta-data is an implementation detail left for the framework to handle. What is Active Record? ====================== Active Record connects business objects and database tables to create a persistable domain model where logic and data is presented in one wrapping. It?s an implementation of the object-relational mapping (ORM) pattern by the same name as described by Martin Fowler: An object that wraps a row in a database table or view, encapsulates the database access, and adds domain logic on that data. Active Record?s main contribution to the pattern is to relieve the original of two stunting problems: lack of associations and inheritance. By adding a simple domain language-like set of macros to describe the former and integrating the Single Table Inheritance pattern for the latter, Active Record narrows the gap of functionality between the data-mapper and active record approach. Learn more: http://activerecord.rubyonrails.org What is Action Pack? ==================== Action Pack splits the response to a web request into a controller part (performing the logic) and a view part (rendering a template). This two-step approach is known as an action, which will normally create, read, update, or delete (CRUD for short) some sort of model part (often database) before choosing either to render a template or redirecting to another action. Action Pack implements these actions as public methods on Action Controllers and uses Action Views to implement the template rendering. Action Controllers are then responsible for handling all the actions relating to a certain part of an application. This grouping usually consists of actions for lists and for CRUDs revolving around a single (or a few) model objects. So ContactController would be responsible for listing contacts, creating, deleting, and update contacts. A WeblogController could be responsible for both posts and comments. Action View templates are written using embedded Ruby in tags mingled in with the HTML. To avoid cluttering the templates with code, a bunch of helper classes provide common behavior for forms, dates, and strings. And it?s easy to add specific helpers to keep the separation as the application extends. Learn more: http://actionpack.rubyonrails.org -- David Heinemeier Hansson, http://www.instiki.org/ -- A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby http://www.basecamphq.com/ -- Web-based Project Management http://www.loudthinking.com/ -- Broadcasting Brain http://www.nextangle.com/ -- Development & Consulting Services