I’m not 100% sure if this is a Rails question or more related to Ruby itself - but how do people think RoR compares to technologies such as Adobe’s Coldfusion?
Both are aimed at producing websites incredibly easily and quickly - and producing code that can be fairly agile. However, RoR obviously places it’s own framework onto the code (which by being fairly generic must reduce performance to a certain extent).
Reason I ask is that currently I am a CF developer who is interested in RoR - but can’t really see anything substantially different (other than the price tag). Am I missing something?
I have been developing in cf since cf 4.5.
I find RoR super easy to get a site up fast. rails is the first
framework i have worked with. and some times i have to go way back
into my head to remember about objects.
I know in CF you can use "objects" with cfc's and those are real cool.
thinks i haven't found in RoR that CF 7 has is event gateways,
http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/event_gateways/
I'm not saying the don't exist I really haven't looked for them.
also I Iike the flash forms and really getting into flex 2.
in my learning of RoR I found the community great. lot's of info. a
couple of problems i have is some of the examples the show using the
ruby console but I have a hard time 'converting' that into a view, and
some examples are for RoR are 'old' but i get them to work.
I still dev in cf but I really like RoR since it has some good
features baked in. I love the fact I don't have to write SQL.
well I'm rambling.
RoR is cool and the perfect fit for some apps and the same can be said
about all the other web app techs.
You can’t see anything substantially different because you’ve yet to actually give Rails and Ruby a try. Learn some Ruby, try out Rails, and then make your decision.
In a lot of ways, this isn’t an apples to apples comparison.
Essentially, ColdFusion is a RAD Environment for Java. CFML code compiles down to Java Byte code.
Capability wise, I would say that ColdFusion does more out of the box, but it is also a 9th? generation product, or 3rd if you count them going from the C runtime to Java. It offers integration with Flash and Flex, and event gateways, it has a better error handling and debugging framework (in my opinion), and a few other items that you don’t get with Rails. Rails also offers some things that you don’t get with CF, so that would really depend on what is important to you. ( This section of the email would have been a lot longer, but I am pressed on time right this sec.)
Performance and Reliability depends more on you than the language/framework you are using for the sake of this comparison. Both are reasonably stable products that run medium scale things today. You could write equally crappy apps with both, or excellent apps with either. I wouldn’t recommend CF for really big multiple server projects, as evidenced by MySpace’s migration to Blue Dragon, the CFML runtime that runs on top of .NET.
So I guess the moral of the story on there criteria is that, it all depends, at least in my opinion.
I see CF as a great way to blast out pages. RoR, though, is a great way
to blast out whole sites.
It's easier to write spaghetti-sites in CF, and it's easier to write
maintainable sites in RoR. (Although either language is capable of
anything.)
It's easier to write slow-running sites in RoR, I think. It takes more
attention to make them snappy.
Finally: Microsoft Access is out-of-the-box for CF, and
"are-you-out-of-your-mind?" in RoR. Seriously, google it and see what
kind of responses the RoR community offers for developers who are crazy
enough to even raise the subject! It isn't pretty.
Oh, yeah, SQL Server's not really out-of-the-box, either. You have to
go download a certain file that's not in the Rails distro, then make a
directory for it in the ruby directory, then paste it in.
It works fine, but it hardly qualifies as out-of-the-box, either.
