Well, I just discovered a feature on Google Trends that sheds a different light on my previous post on web development techniques. Displaying several trends in one image reveals the relative size of search volumes of specific terms.
As can be seen when comparing ‘zope’, ‘plone’, ‘ruby rails’ and ‘turbogears’:
Somewhat related, ‘mambo’ and ‘joomla’:
Try for yourself.
Source: Google Trends
It could mean people know Zope well enough, not to look it up every day. It could also mean Zope is losing ground.
Wow, this is a real must-see for web developers:
A 20 minutes screen-cast comparing 5 web frameworks. With a surprising ending.
Some minutes hours ago, in a phone conversation with a dear friend, who also happens to be a decent programmer, I expressed my feeling about the Model View Controller pattern Rails is claiming to adhere to. Something feels wrong. And not only MVC in Rails.
Say I have a bunch of recipes, all nicely assigned to a smaller subset of categories. (Does that sound familiar?)
In Rails, if I would want to show all recipes on the recipe index page.
My controller class would look like this:
class RecipeController < ApplicationController
model(:recipe)
def index()
@recipes = Recipe.find_all()
end
end
With an accompanying model:
class Recipe < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to(:category)
end
What disturbs me is the find_all() method in Recipe.
Yes, I understand that Recipe subclasses ActiveRecord. But I would not expect the Recipe class to know about all its kin:
Richard.find_all()
paraphrased
"Say Richard, pass me a reference to all people on earth, will you?"
Would it make sense to have some other class that would know about Products and supply the controller with data?
Another thing that bothers me is the php’ish way of having Ruby code in templates.
<% @recipes.each do |recipe| %>
<%= recipe.name %>
<% end %>
Aren’t that model instances we’re massaging in our view? Doesn’t that make our view partly a controller too?
Looking for answers I found an in-depth article (MVC and web apps: oil and water) by Harry Fuecks on MVC and its applicability in web applications. Take your time to read the articles he links to too.
Please let me know what you think.
Pay attention. I’m not bashing Rails. Beautiful apps have been written in that framework. I’m a paying Basecamp user, for example.
Ok, after quite some hours of work I got a grasp of both Ruby and Rails’ basics. In addition to the links I already mentioned, I found the RubyOnRails API also very useful.
Some results:
I took an extra 20 minutes to add the logo. Only because I was making screen shots for my blog 🙂
I’m really tired, so some quick notes.
Before deciding on wether I really want to dig deep into RoR, I want to evaluate Subway, a framework insprired by Rails. It’s written in Python, which gives it a large advantage over Ruby on Rails. Sorry about that 😉
Update 2006-01-09 23:01h: Colleagues pointed me to TurboGears. Another python framework “much like Rails”. My todo list is growing…
As a weekend excercise, I’ve started spending time on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Three Six valuable links:
My aim for this weekend is to build a personal wine review blog, for me and my woman. If I manage to create something, I’ll post screenshots. Or better, a working site! (Nah, don’t bet your money on it)
As well the content, as the level of humour require two extra links, both from Amy Hoy’s (24)slash7.com weblog:
Update 23:54h: Screenshots of my premature ‘reviewer’ product. Time for bed.
Nederhoed 