A Productivity Race: Ruby on Rails vs JPA on OX3

While it's great that OpenXava can do something like this (I admit I hadn't even heard of it before), since you are writing this article in 2008, it's not really fair to be following Rails tutorials from 1 or 2 years ago which don't use the Rails 2.x (released in Dec 2007) model of generating scaffolded applications. Although it's interesting that you compared the two approaches, I think that the article would better serve the reader if it were more accurate and up to date on the Rails side.

That said, I do agree with your point that a lot of the problem with Java is with the developers, and the developers responsible for the many heavyweight frameworks that do exist.

I am not a big fan of Ruby for anything beyond rapid prototyping. Both dynamic typing and programming by convention have problems when you scale the size of your problem or your team.

There are good approaches to "scaffolding" in Java frameworks which can be just as productive (if not more productive due to API discoverability and strong typing).

A quick taste of this can be seen in this video showing how to create a simple bean editor in Wicket.

One very nice thing Sun could give us to make reflection safer and more convenient for this kind of thing would be some kind of static reflective syntax similar to ".class" for fields methods and properties (yes, I know we don't have properties yet):

  Field f = x.field;

  Method m = getValue.method 

  Property p =  value.property

The need for static reflection comes up all the time and there currently is no good solution.

Hi Peter,

since you are writing this article in 2008, it's not really fair to be following Rails tutorials from 1 or 2 years ago which don't use the Rails 2.x

You are right. Maybe using a article that uses Rails 2.0 would be better. But these article are still cited in ruby on rails site, therefore they are very popular article in RubyOnRails comunity.

Anyways, is it Rails 2.0 MVC? Has Rails 2.0 scalfolding for pasive code generation ?

If the answer is yes, there is not significant difference.

Nice Troll Job ;)

 Too bad that it doesn't really contain much meat.  While I'm sure there are some segments of development that benefit from scaffolding, being a professional Rails dev I'ved used them exactly 0 times in production.  I realize that scaffolding is very much a part of the marketting effort for rails, but in practice they are quickly thrown away, true to the name scaffolding.  Fancy features are nice and all on the scaffolding, but I would prefer something that I can more easily turn into the end product. You mention that on the Xava side you don't need to write any HTML at all.  do you have the option?  How would I go about taking a template from my front end guy and replacing the scaffold with my *actual* UI?

 The real productivity gains in rails are probably beyond your understanding seeing as you are so new to rails;  doing an article such as this with no experience with Rails paints you as lazy.  The real productivity gainers in rails are spread across several hundred helpers and conventions, until you start to grasp them it's hard to see the point. 

 Better luck with your next article,

Scott

Javier,

Thanks for the response.

 You cannot. If you have a "fron end guy" then OpenXava is not for you. OpenXava was born for developing business applications, not public internet applications.

Thanks for clearing that up.  That's important to know for someone who is comparing and contrasting from the other "side" :)

 An OpenXava application can be in the future be rendered using Flex or JavaFX, and you will not need to change a line of code from your application. Is this possible with rails and its html-like templates ?

Yeah, it's very trivial to produce non-html from a model.  Out of the box, active records support JSON, XML, and Yaml.  Here's an example of a single rails action responding to multiple request formats (chosen by either Accept headers or explicit format extensions)

 
def show
  @person = Person.find(params[:id]) #load from the db

  respond_to do |format|
    format.html  # => by default would render people/show.html.erb
    format.js{ render :json => @person }
    format.xml { render :text => @person.to_xml, :content_type => 'text/xml' }  #as you can see, there  are many options to customize rendering
  end
end 

Thanks,

Scott

Well, I recently created a framework on top of Wicket for rendering to mobile devices in multiple markup languages which works pretty well. As always with Wicket, you are working with components (In general, I don't really see how you could solve this problem without a component framework) and directly in the markup language, so you get the fine-grained control you're looking for.  But even with OO Java components, this is quite a complex problem.

A company in the Netherlands called Servoy has a product which runs on both Swing and Wicket which is fairly impressive.

In the end, there is a huge amount of discrepancy between even just the few frameworks listed. A grand unification of user interfaces it's not something coming any time soon. You ask far too much of an industry that took a decade to produce JSF.

Hi Cochen,

Annotating your model basically with semantic metadata is a step in the right direction (Web 3.0, here we come), but this is not enough to create an acceptable end-user experience for various user interfaces

The trick here is to use a high abstraction level for defining user interfaces. You have to give tips to your model in order to be render, but not the exact way to do it, and the rendered will do the better job for each UI technology.

Look the comment in OpenXava wiki about this issue.

The very first version of OpenXava was a Swing application generator, and in certain moment we worked using both the web UI and the Swing UI from the same source. Unfortunally, in the open source OX version the swing generator is not present, and currently is dicontinued. But, the high level abstraction for creationg application is still there, and future version of OX will support other presentation technologies, maybe FLEX or JavaFX.

Looks interesting, and is LGPL. Might just use that in a future project. *hits "add bookmark"* Good article, thanks!

Agus From Ruby on Rails Developer