Dear Brothers and Sisters in Ruby, 
I am very glad about the article published on ONLAMP and subsequently slashdotted. This will help the popularity of Ruby and Rails, and will bring new resources to the community. Great! Congratulation to the author Curt Hibbs.
However there are a few things that I think could have been different/improved:
- In the article the author says you can develop with Rails at least 10 times faster than with the typical java framework. How do you know that you are at least *10* times faster? It depends on the kind of web application you are developing, doesn't it? Sometimes it will be just 5 times faster to develop with Ruby on Rails, sometimes 50 times faster, but even though I don't like Java, I wouldn't throw around a big number in an attempt to sound impressive. I think "several times" would sound more realistic.
- MySQL-Front is a good tool, but it's not free. I understand that the author tried to make the article damn easy, but for the few operations on the db, he could have just used MySQL Administrator or MySQL Query Browser from mysql.com. In these kinds of demo/promotional tutorials I believe it would be great to show that you can do all these awesome things for *free*.
- "you can access MySQL without a password". Ok I know the issue, but I think a few more words to reassure the reader would be appropriate (the framework is continually updated by a wonderful community so the next version(s) of Rails will be compatible with MySQL's new authentication algorithm).
Proposing to use MySQL with an empty password (even for the sake of learning, following on the heals of the tutorial) would cause most people to cringe.
I would rather explain how to solve this issue using the "old password" system as suggested on mysql.com.
I would like to hear your opinions about this.
In the end, I thank and congratulate Curt again for his first article of his tutorial "on Rails".
Cheers,
Antonio
路路路
--
My programming blog: http://www.antoniocangiano.com
Agreed, like, not using Windows for example... :>
路路路
Antonio Cangiano <myfirstname@visualcsharp.it> wrote:
However there are a few things that I think could have been
different/improved:
--
Luc Heinrich - lucsky@mac.com
If I recall correctly, the MySQL administrator tools was out of date
(not supporting ver 4), but it looks like they updated it in December
2004. I am using MySQL-Front, but I'll look at the MySQL tool again.
The 10x statement was interesting. I'm somewhat accepting of the
posisbility due to general evaluations I've seen of
Ruby/Python/Perl/TCL vs. Java, as well as some formal studies of code
brevity vs. productivity and bug counts. It'll be interesting to see
if data becomes available regarding web app rewrites from Java to
Ruby.
Nick
路路路
--
Nicholas Van Weerdenburg
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:36:07 +0900, Antonio Cangiano <myfirstname@visualcsharp.it> wrote:
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Ruby, 
I am very glad about the article published on ONLAMP and subsequently
slashdotted. This will help the popularity of Ruby and Rails, and will
bring new resources to the community. Great! Congratulation to the
author Curt Hibbs.
However there are a few things that I think could have been
different/improved:
- In the article the author says you can develop with Rails at least 10
times faster than with the typical java framework. How do you know that
you are at least *10* times faster? It depends on the kind of web
application you are developing, doesn't it? Sometimes it will be just 5
times faster to develop with Ruby on Rails, sometimes 50 times faster,
but even though I don't like Java, I wouldn't throw around a big number
in an attempt to sound impressive. I think "several times" would sound
more realistic.
- MySQL-Front is a good tool, but it's not free. I understand that the
author tried to make the article damn easy, but for the few operations
on the db, he could have just used MySQL Administrator or MySQL Query
Browser from mysql.com. In these kinds of demo/promotional tutorials I
believe it would be great to show that you can do all these awesome
things for *free*.
- "you can access MySQL without a password". Ok I know the issue, but I
think a few more words to reassure the reader would be appropriate (the
framework is continually updated by a wonderful community so the next
version(s) of Rails will be compatible with MySQL's new authentication
algorithm).
Proposing to use MySQL with an empty password (even for the sake of
learning, following on the heals of the tutorial) would cause most
people to cringe.
I would rather explain how to solve this issue using the "old password"
system as suggested on mysql.com.
I would like to hear your opinions about this.
In the end, I thank and congratulate Curt again for his first article of
his tutorial "on Rails".
Cheers,
Antonio
--
My programming blog: http://www.antoniocangiano.com