From: Sean T Allen <sean@...>
Date: 2005-01-23T13:03:17+09:00
Subject: looking at ruby...

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So I'm looking at ruby for both personal and work projects.

Trying to assess whether it would fit my needs.

I definitely like the language as a whole however, I have questions...

most of them in comparison to perl

Most are library related...

Anyway here goes

1. Can someone point me to benchmarks for ruby vs. other languages, perl
    in particular but others as well would be nice. I found a few using 
google
    but they all seemed to be from 2001-2002 which makes the numbers
    rather out of date as I expect ruby has improved speed wise since 
then...

2. mod_ruby vs mod_perl. mod_ruby looks from the surface to be pretty 
complete...
    are there features implemented in mod_perl that mod_ruby lacks?
    are there any problems or 'gotchas' with mod_ruby?

3. Are there ruby templating engines that are comparable feature-wise to
   perl's Template Toolkit? I looked through raa but didnt really find 
anything
   that would fit that basic description. In particular the built in 
caching for
   speed is one area... but the big features here for me are the Plugin
   and Filter interfaces for extending the template system.

4. perl has a Business::Online module that has various sub-module for
    using online payment transaction systems through a unified interface.
    Do similar libraries exist for ruby?

5. Ruby on rails - Active Records. It looks like a really nice system... 
comparable
    to Class::DBI in a lot of was... question I have is... what kind of 
performance
    hit does it incur above using DBI. In the perl universe, we decided not
    to use Class::DBI because of said considerations...

6. Marshalling speed... perl has the Storable module which alas is a tad 
slow...
    how does ruby do in this area?

7. Does ruby on rails work only with a cgi interface or does it work 
with mod_ruby?

That is my first initial round of questions... I can see a number of 
ways that
ruby would certainly make our code easier to deal with and understand as it
makes a lot of the design patterns we use a lot easier to implement, 
understand etc.
And we use a good number of objects in perl which are rather heavy to 
construct etc.
However, perl does have cpan the breadth and depth of which helps offset 
some
of these issues.

My big concern would be diving into ruby to save time and ease 
development in
one area only to have the gains lost in another.

Either way, I'm going to be playing around which ruby as like a lot 
about it...
I played around with Python a few years ago but at the time it had a 
number of
issues that kept it from being used ( no dbi type interface at the time, 
issues with
extending c based classes... ). I started all this by revisiting python but
found that ruby as a language is closer to what I am looking for...

Anyway... you help... thoughts, answers etc greatly appreciated...



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