From: Antonio Cangiano <myfirstname@...>
Date: 2005-01-22T21:36:07+09:00
Subject: [Rails] A few considerations about the ONLAMP.com Rails article

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