Shopping cart ...

[Sam Stephenson]

Sarah,

I thought it would be easier than PHP and perhaps smaller code because
of Ruby elegance, why would it takes so much effort? Perhaps Ruby is not
ready for the kind of project we discuss?

Well, is that what you want us to tell you? You can heed the advice of
others in this thread, or you can continue to repeat unsubstantiated,
opaque claims.

A quick Google Groups search of your name and the words "not ready"
brings up similar posts in the Python[1] and PHP[2] newsgroups. If
you're genuinely interested in what Ruby can do for you, perhaps you
can start by not trolling--or otherwise being hostile--in what many of
us consider to be one of the friendliest communities on the Internet.

Please forgive me if I've misunderstood your intents.

Sam

[1] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/d128dea3deef442
[2] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.php/msg/562ad4268d53ac66

 

[Sarah Tanembaum]

Sarah,

I thought it would be easier than PHP and perhaps smaller code because
of Ruby elegance, why would it takes so much effort? Perhaps Ruby is not
ready for the kind of project we discuss?

Well, is that what you want us to tell you? You can heed the advice of
others in this thread, or you can continue to repeat unsubstantiated,
opaque claims.

A quick Google Groups search of your name and the words "not ready"
brings up similar posts in the Python[1] and PHP[2] newsgroups. If
you're genuinely interested in what Ruby can do for you, perhaps you
can start by not trolling--or otherwise being hostile--in what many of
us consider to be one of the friendliest communities on the Internet.

Please forgive me if I've misunderstood your intents.

Sam

[1] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/d128dea3deef442
[2] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.php/msg/562ad4268d53ac66

Forgive me if I gave you that impression. I was so glad that someone
posted the working mod_ruby and fcgi dlls for windows just a few weeks
ago. I've been hunting that dll since the begining of last year to start
my web project. I ended up using PHP since I couldn't get mod_ruby/eruby
working. Now that it can, I'd like to go further in using Ruby but I
just need some examples and guidance from Ruby gurus such as yourself.

PHP has ample forums with many examples ranging from simple script,
simple apps, and some quite large apps, but it gave everyone what they
need. As for myself, I am quite thankful to those who write simple apps
with some simple explanation, therefore enable myself to extend the apps
or the scripts.

Therefore, I'm hoping that I can get it with the Ruby forums as well.

Again, if I offended anyone, I'm sorry, but my real intention is to
learn Ruby as quick as I can so I can start doing a real work with it.
Or perhaps contribute once I master it.

Thanks

 

[Martin DeMello]

Just to rephrase it, since Web Application such as shopping cart has
many dependencies, Ruby is not ready for such application. Unlike PHP,
Ruby lack many dependencies to build a descent web/graphical
application. Is correct statement?

The thing is, quite apart from the language, there are a bunch of fiddly
details you have to keep in mind when writing a shopping cart. My guess
is that no one in the ruby community felt it'd be sufficiently
fun/interesting to go through this particular exercise; the php
community being so much bigger meant it was likelier to include someone
with an interest in shopping carts.

martin

 

[Sarah Tanembaum]

The thing is, quite apart from the language, there are a bunch of fiddly
details you have to keep in mind when writing a shopping cart. My guess
is that no one in the ruby community felt it'd be sufficiently
fun/interesting to go through this particular exercise; the php
community being so much bigger meant it was likelier to include someone
with an interest in shopping carts.

martin

In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP
language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far
fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart,
cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc...

That is what I've been saying all along, but there are some reluctancy
amongs Rubyist to admit this issues. Perhaps if we realize this problem,
we can fix it and make Ruby the language of choice to do fun and quite
interesting projects.

Just my 2cents ..

 

[Martin DeMello]

In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP
language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far
fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart,
cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc...

Are you deliberately misinterpreting me? I said it was tedious to write
a shopping cart, quite independent of the language. If I did have to
write one (e.g. if my boss said "We need a shopping cart and it has to
be developed in-house") I'd definitely do it in ruby. In other words,
I'm saying that, given my particular interests and inclinations, a
shopping cart is neither fun nor interesting. However, given a large
enough set of people, there's likely to be *someone* for whom it is
interesting. The ruby community just doesn't have that critical mass
yet.

That is what I've been saying all along, but there are some reluctancy
amongs Rubyist to admit this issues. Perhaps if we realize this problem,
we can fix it and make Ruby the language of choice to do fun and quite
interesting projects.

If you are interested in carts, sit down and define the requirements
exactly. I guarantee you you'll find a nice ruby library already exists
for every requirement. It's the design stage that is the problem.

martin

 

[mark sparshatt]

In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP
language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far
fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart,
cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc...

No, in other words it's a bit tedious to do in any language. Since the
Ruby community is smaller than the PHP community there hasn't yet been
anyone sufficiently interested in shopping cart applications to go to
the effort of writing one.

 

[Alan Garrison]

I'm not a Rubyist, it's the first time I post here, I'm learning Ruby
and Rails coming from Python, Zope and also PhP.
I just want to say that I don't see any interesting solution in PhPland
for e-commerce or content management. OSCommerce is ok for small shops,
but start to reorganize it to support an important commercial brand and
see: customization is a _pain_, there's no separation between logic and
views. Thrust me, I've implemented in 2003 an e-commerce site for a
_big_ corporation to serve more than 80 countries and I've tried every
solution I was able to find, at the end I've implemented everything from
scratch. There are also other problems, for example with OSCommerce you
must use MySQL (and of course everything is hardcoded inside the
application). Using MySQL for a big production site is, in my
really-clueless-really-closeminded way of thinking, asking for pain.
Content management is a different beast: nobody actually knows what
exactly is a CMS, everyone has it's own version. I find PhP CMSs rather
simple, I'd call them "Web Publishers" instead of CMS, and the problem is
that central M I'd call Plone a CMS, it has the most important
features: a CMS _must_ implement workflow, not just "permissions", it
has to be customizable and extendable. And Plone is rather simple as a
CMS, look at the products from Vignette or Documentum.
I don't want to bash PhP or the PhP community, but sometimes their
approach is a little too simplicistic.
At least in Ruby I don't have to go through the search-install-try-#!?@%
thing

This is why I mentioned Horde in another part of this thread. I'm
thinking if Ruby had a good, solid application base for general purpose
apps, writing a shopping cart, a wiki, a CMS, whatever, would be easier
than writing one from scratch since all the common core stuff is taken
care of. (Disclaimer, I know almost nothing about Rails and zero about
IOWA). Have one solid base that handles users, groups, ACLS, a neutral
database layer, HTML templating, etc. There are lots of little shopping
carts out there, and regardless of what language they are written in
they are typically small potatos that can't scale.

I hope I don't come off as a Horde fanboy (I'm not, quite frankly I'm
sick of looking at the gobs of PHP code), though I think the basic model
is a good thing to build off of as opposed to writing lots of smaller
apps from scratch. For the shopping cart idea, consider things like who
is going to administer the back end database, who is going to design the
layout, who is going to handle payments, shipping, stock, etc. I'm sure
someone could easily roll out a Ruby shopping cart that handles a core
set of requirements. But freshmeat.net is chock full of these kinds of
*basic* apps since someone's *basic* itch was scratched. That's fine,
just I think if the chosen language happens to be Ruby that this will
probably just happen again. If someone wants to write a killer app,
they are going to need to approach it like one. Having said that, a
solid core application base which handles common things needed in
shopping carts, cms's, email clients, etc, would make development easier.

I'll shut up now

 

[Carl Youngblood]

In other word, it is a bit tedious to do it in Ruby, whereas in PHP
language(and its library) has more complete tools/utilities to do far
fun/interesting projects/excercise - which include shopping cart,
cataloging, content management, interactive database apps, etc...

That is what I've been saying all along, but there are some reluctancy
amongs Rubyist to admit this issues. Perhaps if we realize this
problem, we can fix it and make Ruby the language of choice to do fun
and quite interesting projects.

Just my 2cents ..

I know what you are saying, and I myself would have agreed with you at
one point in time, but you should also understand that PHP was designed
first and foremost to be a language for web applications, so it has all
the scaffolding necessary for these things by default. Many developers,
however, do not want to write web applications, and don't want to have
20 megs worth of add-ons (such as apache and an rdbms) installed along
with ruby. Your experience with PHP was probably easier because you
downloaded one of the all-in-one setups of apache/php/mysql out there
(such as XAMPP). If you had not, you would probably have just as much
setup and configuration to do as you now have with a package like ruby
on rails, which actually is quite smooth, especially if you use webrick
instead of apache and perhaps some lightweight database like sqlite. It
will be even easier when Curt finished his all-in-one rails installation
for windows.

What you are missing is that PHP is _not_ a good language to do many
things besides web applications in for the very reasons that all this
scaffolding is provided for you. It is a very specialized language and
IMO doesn't have the broad appeal that Ruby does.

One other comment I would make is that, in my opinion, Ruby is a very
powerful language, but its benefits aren't always immediately obvious to
a beginner. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I have been
programming for over 10 years now, and I would say that many of Ruby's
advantages wouldn't be noticed by someone who didn't have a strong
background in object-oriented programming, which takes a while to grasp
(and about which, like I said, I still don't consider myself an expert)
Not that Ruby has a steep learning curve, but that it takes a while
to fully appreciate.

Carl