I have stumbled across the reason Apple is so smitten by the Ruby on Rails community. Other than the chic geek cool and the fact that the Rails crowd tends to carry Macs around with them…I think Apple has been shopping for a replacement for .mac and iWeb. The old service is getting long in the teeth and the cost/benefit ratio is sucking these days. Apple had it right a decade ago with the first iTools they rolled out as freebie experiments in OS 9. Since then, lots of things have changed: no free iLunch any more, OS X, Ruby on Rails.
See, Rails and Ruby both play well with Macs, after they’re set up right. In fact, Ruby also plays well with Cocoa… so well, that it makes the perfect glue layer for web-centric apps and services for Mac-centric apps. On top of that, the main mojo of Ruby and Rails is the same as Cocoa and Macs and Apple: keep it simple and clean and make stuff that works, but make the making of that stuff easier to do as well!
In case you have lived in a cave for the last 10 or 12 months, Apple is going to deliver OS X 10.5 with Ruby and Rails properly installed and ready to go. They’re even working closely with the main Rails folks to ensure this is done right. I assure you apple is already toying with Rails and Ruby in-house. You see it’s not only the future of iWeb and .mac here, it’s also a longer term replacement for the fleeting WebObjects software. Apple just didn’t make it big with that one. Nice stuff, but it just didn’t sell enough. Apple proved it works by using it. But like all good things, it too must go, because something more good is here and it’s arrival is soon to be trumpeted to all.
ROX
Rails On OS X
Hey, I guess I just coined a new one for the Alphabet Soup!
Today, I tried out Radiant CMS, a super light weight, very simple, to the point, but expandable CMS built on Ruby and Rails. Man, Radiant is cool. It feels similar to using Blogger, but it’s more focused on simple static sites. It’s the tool I’ve been toying with making in PHP for myself: a tool that just separates the main parts of static pages, but makes updating and adding content easy while keeping visual continuity and generating standards compliant pages. Radiant divides the work into 3 main sections: First the content of the body of a page. Second, snippets of code that gets reused frequently on multiple pages, but may need to be edited, like navigation menus. And last, the skeleton of the xhtml structure of the page and place-holders for the snippets. The simplicity and clear divisions of labor are what are nice here. But I have to say it is also a pretty damned intuitive setup. No other CMS I’ve seen yet does this well and does it neatly.
All that’s needed is a WYSIWYG interface for the code-fearing members of society, and Apple would have a replacement for iWeb and .mac all ready to go!
2 comments ↓
Care to re-evaluate this article. Rails is largely crap, like most web frameworks, except WebObjects. It’ll be found out soon enough. It will go the way of perl. Eventually, because it’s unmaintainable. Apples’ support of rails is a decoy for those impressionable younglings who don’t know any better, ie. most so called “web developers”, or over mouthing “consultants”. Jobs stated years ago the Apple is to be one of the biggest _Internet_ companies. WO is the basis of the implementation, not some scriptie toy environment that perl, php, j2ee, cold fusion, asp (insert mediocre web-app technology here), defectors now espouse. Care to explain why Apple actually _funds_ development of the highly active open-source WebObjects WOLips Eclipse plug-in and tools, and has done for quite a while? WebObjects’ runtime frameworks, these tools and the other open source framework enhancements like ProjectWONDER & WireHose make every other web-app tech look like a MS-DOS era joke. Which they really are. ps I develop and maintain in both, and rails is an absolute pain. No components, no tools, no encapsulation, no re-use but copy/paste code or whole files/directories, screwed up mvc, no database constraints (eg. foreign keys), validations that don’t work (ie. all validates_blah_of don’t work in a multi-threaded/multi-process environment), poor source code maintainability, poor performance, ruby is a joke language for applications–it should be kicked back to shell scripting glue it was created for. But hey, there’s money to be made in the HYPE!
Care to pay attention to the date of an article? Why bother responding to a blog post that is a year and half old?
As for WebObjects, yeah, it was the bee’s knees in the in 90’s. If MacRuby pans out like it’s going now, though, we will have Ruby coding fully bridged to Cocoa. Objective-C speed with Ruby syntax goodness.
In my opinion, Apple keeps WebObjects going because they invested heavily in it years ago, and they had the people and ability to use it since then. The Apple store and iTunes Store are both built with WebObjects. That does not mean they will be forever…
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