Ruby on Rails Conference in Silicon Valley
Last weekend I went to SD Forum’s Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.
I started learning Ruby just recently. I heard about it a few months ago reading about some of these Web 2.0 startups. Seemed like that’s what cool kids use nowadays. Although it’s not that new language, it was invented in Japan in mid 90-ies, first English books appeared just few years ago.
Rails is an extension of Ruby (what experts call DSL – domain specific language) that helps you build web applications very quickly. It very cleanly separates view layer from controllers. You can generate your HTML by using RHTML files that look very similar to JSP’s. Ruby code is embedded in HTML using familiar <% = JSP syntax %>
Data to object mapping is done automatically and it expects your schema to be built in certain way. That means it might be hard to use it if you have proprietary database schema. For example, it expects all tables to have one primary key named ID.
Other thing that shows immaturity of this language is that Oracle drivers are still an effort of one person. They are built over Oracle 8i (which is desupported by Oracle now). I tested, they work on 10g. They are OCI drivers. That means you still have to install Oracle client software on your machine. For example, there are two versions of Oracle Jdbc drivers – OCI that use Oracle binaries and Thin that are 100% Java. There is no 100% Ruby version of Oracle drivers yet.
I haven’t worked on a software that didn’t need to talk to database in my career. Since I come from Oracle world, it was usually Oracle database. What I tried worked. Would I run my credit card processing system on Ruby ? Hmmm…