On Jun 12, 2008, at 5:30 PM, Aparajita Fishman wrote:
My
neighbors are Rails, Cake and Symfony, and I'm looking jealously over
the fence.
So am I! If 4D had been a SQL database to begin with, I would be
using Rails right now. In fact, I wonder how long Active4D will last
once v11 usage becomes widespread, since v11 supports ODBC and thus
Rails/PHP.
Who here would leave Active4D if they could? I know some already have.
We are moving part of our application to Rails, but I have mixed
feelings about it. Rails is not the holy grail - it is a nice
framework, but it is not an easy transition. We ended up hiring a
rails consultant to give is a kick start, but now we still have to
build on someone else code. You also have to deal with a bunch of
plugin, version changes, etc.
Rails is not a language, but a huge library of calls - so many calls
and options that it is difficult to become fluent it it. Besides the
generated code (scaffold), you seem to spend more time looking up how
to do something than doing it.
When the iPhone SDK first came out, you heard a lot of complaints
about using Objective C. But it was not the language Objective C, it
was the library available in Objective C. Rails is about the same.
Other than basic conditionals and loops, you rarely use Ruby in a
Rails project.
Since I am a lot more comfortable in Active4D, I experimented with
"Restful Active4D". I created a library that handled REST. It was
patterned after Rails with Model, View and Controller directories and
libraries. Had Restful URLs etc. Of course something else came up and
I have not had a chance to work on it. I plan on retiring in a few
months and maybe I'll get back to it. Before I stopped I had different
parts finished to the proof of concept phase. REST was really pretty
easy. The controller would call generic library routines that mapped
the model to rowsets. I may have been dreaming on my capability of
pulling this off, but generating scaffold views, form helpers, etc
seemed doable.
While fusebox in Active4D forced you into good patterns of
development, it was a copy and paste type development. Defining a
model and then generating a scaffold application could possible make
life simpler.
I don't know how much longer my agency will continue with 4D. For me,
it may be over in a few months, but it's been a nice ride and I will
probably still have to dabble in it for a while.
Steve Alex
AIDT IT Manager
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