Voting Is Open for the 2010 DevSummit User Presentations
One big change from the 2009 ESRI DevSummit is that users will now vote on which presentations they wish to see at the 2010 DevSummit. Go here to pick which ones you think would be valuable to the community. Normally I wouldn’t promote a talk myself (and I’m not giving one this year), but I think “Ruby-fu: Using ArcGIS Server with Rails” by Dave Bouwman is something people should be voting for. Ruby is here to stay and there are many of us working on projects that use Rails at the backend. ESRI of course already has a wonderful API to use with Rails so there is no excuse not to look at a quicker, more robust framework.
Oh, Ruby!
” excuse not to look at a quicker, more robust framework.”
more robust then what?
.NET of course….
hahaha… now that IS funny James…
having used both Rails and .NET I can easily say that .NET is more robust then Rails… without doubt. The only “more robust” feature of Rails is ActiveRecord.
Now, I would say you can ripe out an app faster in Rails then .net since alot of the 80% of what you need is canned but that doesnt (IMO) make it more robust… just more default/baked in.
the whole ESRI .NET Framework is a joke and should be dropped. It is impossible to get it to do anything you want and when you remove it (using Silverlight or the JSAPI) ArcGIS Server suddenly becomes robust and smooth.
Kevin, I get you’ve invested much of your life to promoting a failed framework, but let it go please. Think of the children being hurt by having to use .NET web applications.
I’m promoting .NET? hmmm… you must not have read my post where I clearly stated I use BOTH Rails and .NET (also PHP) for my job – since nothing is certain in IT I find it useful to be able adapt to a particular client need (be it .net, php, rails, whatever). Unlike James, however, I’m not an anti-softie zealot attached to the Rails/Google/whatever else is new bandwagon.
I never understood framework wars / os wars / langauge wars… use what works for you Lefty…
That being said – when someone says “oh… it better” I simply want them to back it up. Tell me Lefty – how is it “dying” – feel free to back that up with something other then personal feelings ***double points if you’re typing this on a Mac with an “I hate windows sticker on it”
Kevin, I think you fell into James’ trap.
I’ve been taking a close look at Rails since our organization decided to drop Windows Servers because of licensing costs. The speed at which you can develop is something that will benefit us as we spend months developing .NET apps that don’t do much more than a simple javascript map app would do. The minute that the REST API = the SOAP API will the the death of web .NET with ESRI. At least as a popular choice.
Says the non-developer.
I’d love to hear how ArcGIS Server devs are using Rails. We also are moving toward Rails as a framework away from .NET.
Thanks for the plug James!
For what it’s worth, we’re getting into Rails mainly as a way to diversify our skill set. Exploring a different technology stack can be a very mind-expanding undertaking. Learning how to look at problems from a different perspective (aka “the Rails Way”) helps with all the other development we do.
More specific to the ESRI stack, we’ve already ditched the .NET ADF, and are happily building web apps using ASP.NET MVC (see Brian Noyle’s presentation from the last Dev Summit for more on MVC). Since MVC was heavily influenced by Rails, the transition has been pretty smooth.
So – for us, it’s more a language transition, and less about losing functionality (although we’ll still have to use .NET for those handy Server Object Extensions!).
Cheers,
Dave
[...] Why vote for this? Ruby is a lot of fun, and offers a different point of view on development… and James Fee says you should [...]
It’s great to see Rails getting some mentions from you guys. I’ve been developing in Rails for 4+ years along side my day job .NET stuff. ASP.NET MVC has been a breath of fresh air and I’ve pretty much abandoned WebForms for MVC. ASP.NET MVC is a perfect complement to the Flex API in that you can make it your back-end JSON data store for all the things the AGS REST API doesn’t provide (e.g. find all unique values, etc.). We use it heavily alongside our Flex work.
Dave, another thing you may consider with Rails is it’s code generation abilities to aide your .NET MVC work. We use it to stub out our data access layer in MVC by using Rails views to emit C# code. In the end we have a complete LinqToSql DAL (C# class files) that we can plug into our MVC apps. Saves lots of time. It’s not a traditional use of Rails, but I’ve been using this technique for a few years now and it works great. I hope you get a chance to present at the Dev Summit. Good luck!