Hi all, Allow me to introduce myself. I''m the lead Java instructor at a technical college in Wisconsin, USA. I teach Java, HTML, Perl, J2EE, SQL, etc. I know enterprise java well and teach it in all its complicated glory and use it in my consulting business. I, like lots of other java people, am starting to get tired of how big and gnarly it is getting. I have been to the JavaOne conference for many years and no one ever talks about simplifying, just adding more and more stuff. It is in this state of mind that I started looking at Ruby and RoR. And I am liking it very, very much. I have this idea that keeps pestering me and I am looking for some feedback and suggestions. I am planning on starting an open-source project as an educational device. I always have a set of good students that I can''t really challenge. My goal is to manage an active OSS project that is mostly coded by current and former students. This would give me and my students a good challenge. My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and unspecified) OSS project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. Also, what do you think of this idea as an educational tool? Any and all suggestions and comments would be appreciated. Thanks, -Eric
Eric Knapp wrote:> My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and > unspecified) OSS project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. Also, > what do you think of this idea as an educational tool? Any and all > suggestions and comments would be appreciated.I''d say Rails is invaluable. I''ve found my programming style in other languages has improved enormously thanks to the concepts I''ve been introduced to via Rails, and Ruby is rapidly becoming my language of choice, having come *from* PHP and Java. The only proviso I''d make is that the debug info can be a little dense if you''re coming at coding anew, but the ease of testing makes that a trade-off worth making. If you''re hunting around for a (somewhat ambitious?) Ruby project to get off the ground, there was talk of a native Lucene port a few hours ago which seems like it could use a bit of a push. A Rails generator front-end to a Ruby/Lucene backend (with appropriate RPC bits and bobs) would be *extremely* nice to see. -- Alex
In article <43399DF0.8050405-qV/boFbD8Meu8LGVeLuP/g@public.gmane.org>, alex- qV/boFbD8Meu8LGVeLuP/g@public.gmane.org says...> The only proviso I''d make is > that the debug info can be a little dense if you''re coming at coding > anew,Or really sparse, if you''re used to C++ with the STL... :) -- Jay Levitt | Wellesley, MA | I feel calm. I feel ready. I can only Faster: jay at jay dot fm | conclude that''s because I don''t have a http://www.jay.fm | full grasp of the situation. - Mark Adler
> My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and > unspecified) OSS project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. > Also, what do you think of this idea as an educational tool? Any and > all suggestions and comments would be appreciated.I think this is a great idea. If I understand you correctly, you''re looking to find a way to keep some students who might otherwise be bored in class busy with an additional project. I think more students *should* be exposed to collaboration as an integral part of their project work. It''s especially important to be able to work with others who aren''t local, who might have different values or interests in the project, etc. Getting students involved in an open-source project seems like a great plan. You might find that supervising their work is quite different from supervising their usual homework assignments, though. I''d bet that smart students interested in web development would be interested in learning Rails. It''s probably something that motivated kids could teach themselves. It certainly encourages ways of organizing code that make it easier to collaborate with than some other frameworks. There are at the moment a lot of people who''d probably want to help out newbie students. As to the relevance of Rails itself for this "unspecified" project, it''s hard to say. What''s the project?
On 28-Sep-05, at 12:44 AM, Eric Knapp wrote:> My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and > unspecified) OSS project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. > Also, what do you think of this idea as an educational tool? Any > and all suggestions and comments would be appreciated.Rails would be a good choice, since Ruby is a very easy language to pick up. Rails also teaches you a number of soft skills and good practices, that I haven''t really found with other projects; some of them are test driven development, proper use of the MVC architecture and Object Oriented Programming. A good project would be some thing to do with e-learning; since that something that would help you everyday. Good Luck Best Regards Warren Noronha GNU (http://www.gnu.org.in) _______________________________________________ Rails mailing list Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
I think another aspect to consider is that Ruby & Rails provide a fairly contrasting "view of the world" to that provided by J2EE plus all its various frameworks. Ruby/Rails has: - really one design approach (MVC), not several. It''s a very good, simple fit for a sizeable subset of development tasks, not an attempt to solve every programming problem known to man. - ActiveRecord is THE toolset, not one of several. Same benefit as above - Ruby code is much more concise than Java; lots less lines of code (and consequently, bugs) to achieve a specific task - Ruby dev is much faster than Java dev - if you''re using tools like Eclipse for Java dev, you can leverage it for Ruby and further reinforce the message that Java isn''t the be-all, end-all solution to everything - the ease of creating unit test cases with Rails, which is (I believe - haven''t used it for some time) a bit of a contrast to JUnit I think it''d be a very interesting approach, and it''d probably broaden a few minds in the process Dave M. On 9/28/05, Warren Noronha <warren-0jIIvIziipmf0DUV/oxz1A@public.gmane.org> wrote:> > On 28-Sep-05, at 12:44 AM, Eric Knapp wrote: > > > My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and unspecified) OSS > project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. Also, what do you think of > this idea as an educational tool? Any and all suggestions and comments would > be appreciated. > > Rails would be a good choice, since Ruby is a very easy language to pick up. > Rails also teaches you a number of soft skills and good practices, that I > haven''t really found with other projects; some of them are test driven > development, proper use of the MVC architecture and Object Oriented > Programming. > > A good project would be some thing to do with e-learning; since that > something that would help you everyday. > > Good Luck > > Best Regards > Warren Noronha > GNU (http://www.gnu.org.in) > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails > > >
Thanks for all the ideas. I am now leaning towards using RoR for this project. It is "unspecified" because I want my students to have a say in what it is. The next steps are to pick a hosting site and some management tool for the project. It there a preferred site for RoR projects? I would prefer one that supports subversion if possible. I will probably use Basecamp for project management. Thanks again, -Eric On Sep 27, 2005, at 2:14 PM, Eric Knapp wrote:> Hi all, > > Allow me to introduce myself. I''m the lead Java instructor at a > technical college in Wisconsin, USA. I teach Java, HTML, Perl, > J2EE, SQL, etc. I know enterprise java well and teach it in all its > complicated glory and use it in my consulting business. I, like > lots of other java people, am starting to get tired of how big and > gnarly it is getting. I have been to the JavaOne conference for > many years and no one ever talks about simplifying, just adding > more and more stuff. > > It is in this state of mind that I started looking at Ruby and RoR. > And I am liking it very, very much. I have this idea that keeps > pestering me and I am looking for some feedback and suggestions. I > am planning on starting an open-source project as an educational > device. I always have a set of good students that I can''t really > challenge. My goal is to manage an active OSS project that is > mostly coded by current and former students. This would give me and > my students a good challenge. > > My question is what do all think of using RoR on a new (and > unspecified) OSS project? The other choices would be PHP or Java. > Also, what do you think of this idea as an educational tool? Any > and all suggestions and comments would be appreciated. > > Thanks, > > -Eric > > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails >
On 9/30/05, Eric Knapp <ejknapp-ee4meeAH724@public.gmane.org> wrote:> The next steps are to pick a hosting site and some > management tool for the project. It there a preferred site for RoR > projects? I would prefer one that supports subversion if possible.A lot of projects are hosted on RubyForge (http://rubyforge.org). It''s a SourceForge clone intended for Ruby projects. Unfortunately, IIRC, they only provide CVS, not Subversion. Still, it''s not bad to use just as a place to put up your file releases and have a free, public wiki for the project. I believe that Tigris (http://tigris.org) uses Subversion.> I will probably use Basecamp for project management.Depending on your process, you might want to check out eXPlainPMT (http://explainpmt.com). It differs from Basecamp in that it is simply a "story card librarian" and iteration planning tool for projects using something like the eXtreme Programming methodology -- it''s not got as many features for "communication" which is where Basecamp shines. On the other hand, eXPlainPMT is open-source (current release is GPL, although I''m considering something less restrictive for the 2.x+ releases), so you can easily modify it to suit your needs. Disclaimer: eXPlainPMT is my baby, so consider this a shameless plug. -- Regards, John Wilger ----------- Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don''t know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn''t matter." - Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland
On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 13:06 -0400, John Wilger wrote:> On 9/30/05, Eric Knapp <ejknapp-ee4meeAH724@public.gmane.org> wrote: > > The next steps are to pick a hosting site and some > > management tool for the project. It there a preferred site for RoR > > projects? I would prefer one that supports subversion if possible. > > A lot of projects are hosted on RubyForge (http://rubyforge.org). It''s > a SourceForge clone intended for Ruby projects. Unfortunately, IIRC, > they only provide CVS, not Subversion. Still, it''s not bad to use just > as a place to put up your file releases and have a free, public wiki > for the project.Yup, although we may get Subversion support set up on RubyForge pretty soon. I''ve been reading up on it in the PragProg book and it seems like a lot of our CVS processes (i.e., xinetd vs a standalone daemon and all that) may carry over to Svn. So, stay tuned... Yours, Tom