#4 What is Ruby on Rails?

What is Ruby on Rails?


New Security Framework for Ruby on Rails
(Score:5, Informative)
by Bruce Perens (3872) Alter Relationship on Friday October 14, @10:18AM (#13790766)
(http://perens.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 16, @04:13PM)

ModelSecurity helps Ruby on Rails developers implement a security defense in depth by implementing access control within the data model.

If you are like most developers, you think about security when you program controllers and views. But a bug in your controller or view can compromise the security of your application, unless your data model has also been secured.

The economical, flexible, and extremely readable means of specifying access controls provided by ModelSecurity makes it easier for the developer to think about security, and makes security assumptions that might otherwise live in one developers head concrete and communicable to others.

* Home Page [perens.com]
* Tutorial [perens.com].
* Reference [perens.com].
* RubyForge project [rubyforge.org].

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by Fished (574624) Alter Relationship on Friday October 14, @09:36AM (#13790416)
I've been using RoR, and I'm convinced that it is not just a flash in the pan. Let me preface this by saying that I've programmed in just about everything out there... from perl/mod_perl/cgi development, to php, to Zope, to Java, to Struts, etc. I have never seen a framework that makes it so easy to quickly develop well-architected applications as rails. A lot of the credit for this goes to two things. First, Rails features, out of the box, excellent use of automation to setup the structure of your app for you. I can have basic CRUD functionality for a table with literally one command ('script/generate scaffold TableName'). Second, Rails has a built-in ORM layer (ActiveRecord) that greatly simplifies everything, in particular because it is very good ORM.

On one of the Rails pages they talk about a functional website in less times than other frameworks would have you spend on XML situps, and I have to agree. (Excursus: am I the only one who is underwhelmed with XML for application configuration? Apparently not!) Everything depends much less on configuration and much more on convention. This means less code to debug, which means more time to write the really distinctive stuff that was why you were custom-coding an app in the first place.

Ruby is also a dream come true. The speed of perl, the OO features of python, but without perl's crufty syntax and python's rigidity. Where in the past Ruby was often poorly documented, and sometimes slow and buggy, it has largely overcome these limitations.

Try rails. You'll like it.
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Curt Hibbs (author of that Rails article) has just released Instant Rails [rubyforge.org].

Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/ [rubyforge.org]
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