Horst Herb wrote: > If you are still in doubt whether browser based web-apps can be as responsive > and rich as desktop apps, check > http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1 > > (that is, if you are not already used to full featured Ajaxian web apps like > gmail etc.) > > After you have been impressed, rest assured that the performance within an > intranet is instantaneous, just as classic desktop GUI > > Now, observe the power of RoR as development platform: > http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts > > Still in doubt?
No doubt that Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) is good stuff, and absolutely no doubt that sensibly AJAX-enabled Web frameworks based on dynamic languages are the way to go, but choosing a development platform is a pretty fundamental thing and I urge everyone to proceed carefully and not just take Horst's recommendation of RoR as Bible truth. I have enormous respect for Horst's abilities and intelligence, but technologically he can be a bit bull-at-a-gate and over the years he does seem to have started but not quite completed (at least not to the point where they can be released to others) a string of software projects which he has told us about on this list, each using slightly different technologies, and Horst is the first to admit that he is time-poor. Thus, I would urge several independent test drives of RoR and of its competitors in the open source dynamic language Web app framework marketplace of ideas - those are, I think, Django and Turbogears (both Python-based) - in a more relaxed and languorous fashion than Horst might be able to do, given the enormous competing demands on his time. The main Django site is at http://www.djangoproject.com/ and has lots of documentation and introductory material, but there is also a introductory screencast at http://www.throwingbeans.org/django_screencasts.html Django has grown out of an industrial-strength content management system for a series of newspaper web sites, and is attracting a lot of attention - there are several large-scale sites using Django listed on teh home page of its web site. It's architecture is elegant and is readily extensible. It doesn't feature a lot of spiffy AJAX stuff out of the box, but lots can be added. A serious alternative is TurboGears, also Python-based, mixing in teh best-of-breed Python subcomponents. See http://www.turbogears.org/ - there is a link to a 20 minute screencast from the front page which demonstrates the construction of a wiki from scratch... TurboGears includes more AJAX browser widgets out-of-the-box, using the very well-written and rather Pythonic MochiKit Javascript library (by contrast RoR uses the Dojo Javascript library, which although capable of some slick client-side browser tricks and effects, is more than a bit horrifying when you start to examine the source code for it and the unspeakably horrible abuses of the browser document object models to which it resorts to achieve its apparent magic). With Turbogears you can even substitute alternative object-relational mapping layers (it supports two very good one, SQLobejct and SQLalchemy, but others can be used or these can be tweaked - with Django to some extent and definitely with RoR you are completely stuck with the object/data persistence mechanism provided) - but all support multiple back-end storage engines. RoR is written in Ruby, which is a nice language which is a cross between Python and Perl in many respects. However, Ruby is much younger than Python and doesn't have such a large (and smart) community behind it, nor an incredible depth of third party packages and add-ins for it. It is also a fair bit slower than Python- which may or may not matter - but Python is highly optimised and there is a multi-million Euro EU-funded project to make Python orders of magnitude faster again through some super-clever compiler tricks. Nor does Ruby have both Google *and* Microsoft backing it, as Python does. So, I am not asserting that Django or Turbogears are better than Ruby-on-Rails, or that RoR is not the framework/language of choice for an open primary care EMR/ER project. I am just saying that it might not be wise to just take Horst's word for it. Finally, for those with fast broadband connections and lots of download overhead, this 400MB 35-minute screencast from NASA on rapid Web app development frameworks is both amusing and instructive: http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov and reinforces the view that Horst is barking up trees in the right copse with RoR, if not exactly the right tree. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
