Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 21st November 2007 10:45


>
> >>> Maybe I'm missing something but Rails looks excellent at building
> >>> something from scratch, but where there is an existing something (in
> >> Providing your database conforms to certain rules, you can use rake
> >> migrate
> >> to use it within rails
> > Rake migrate is a tool to migrate a database between certain version
> > numbers
> That's what I thought it was for and that was about the point I got to
> in my evaluation.
>
> > Rails uses certain conventions for the database but, at the end of the
> > day, they are only conventions. For example, a column named 'id' is the
> This is really where I came in. Not all of my tables have a single ID
> field, and I prefer not to use autonumber fields. Often a record will be
> identified by many fields, I think the most I've used is four fields
> (each one of these fields being a relationship to another table).
>
> The question is could rails handle this easily?
>

No, it can't. It simply can't support a properly normalised database:
all the relationships that should be modelled in the database through
the primary/foreign key mechanism have instead to be modelled in Ruby
using Active Record. This is a crippling defect, in my opinion, and
sadly, it is being copied in other similar frameworks such as Zend (PHP)
and Django (Python). It's such a shame because other aspects of Rails
are really lovely, especially the controller component.

One framework I've seen that does get this aspect right is the PHP
Symfony: http://www.symfony-project.org which uses Propel
http://propel.phpdb.org/trac/ to provide a high level model the
database. I haven't tried all of it yet, but I've used Propel on its own
heavily and it is really nice.

Graham

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