Ted Leung on the air : Rails and TextMate

I finally got around to watching a Ruby on Rails movie I waited so long that I got to see the new improved one. The demo is pretty impressive, especially compared to my web app experience, which involved either JSP (pre struts), Struts, and Python CGI (pyblosxom). The net result is that I'm now more motivated to look at Django, to see if it offers a similar kind of experience. Cool as Rails is, I'm not quite ready to learn Ruby (although lots of people that I respect like it). The parts that look perlish make me break out in a cold sweat. On the other hand Ruby has continuations and Python probably never will, so if I want to play with a continuation based web framework (and yes, I know about Seaside and Cocoon Flow), maybe Ruby will end up in my language pile.

I also have to say that it looked like TextMate has some cool moves. I wonder if those moves translate well to Python.

PyPy will probably have continuations (or does it already? It must). And Greenlets are... something. I'm not really exactly sure; not quite continuations, but something close.
Posted by Ian Bicking at Thu Jul 28 00:03:51 2005

And CherryFlow gives you a continuation based web framework in Python, too. It uses an extension to save the state of generators, as generators are the nearest thing to coroutines (as a very primitiv form of continuations) in Python. And CherryFlow is integrated with Subway, one of the nearest things to Rails in Python. I didn't try it up to now, though.
Posted by hugo at Thu Jul 28 01:06:26 2005

Ruby has a project called Wee which is basically like Seaside for Ruby. However, I realized that the Smalltalk syntax, the keyword messages and the ease of sending multiple blocks to a method make it nicer to work in than Wee. On the other hand, I wrote a small script to control Xmms in about 30 minutes from the web with Wee, while I couldn't have done it with Seaside because Squeak has no Xmms library as far as I know. Balance, balance...
Posted by Vincent Foley at Thu Jul 28 03:39:25 2005

I just started using Subway. It's slick, though not as polished as Rails. It's still too young for that, but MVC and DRY are there. Subway needs more developers working on it, and I think a lot of those free developers haved recently jumped on the Django bandwagon instead.
Posted by John P. Speno at Thu Jul 28 06:03:29 2005

Would the co-routine work done in PEP 342 get you what you need? Or is there something else in continuations that you want, that you can't get out of coroutines?

I understand the PEP well enough, but I've had no experience with continuations.
Posted by Jay P. at Thu Jul 28 09:11:14 2005

I have been similarly interested in rails, but put off by needing to take the time to learn ruby as well. I grabbed Django a week or so ago and have been working through the tutorials and trying it out by rebuilding my wordpress powered site with it.

It does have rough edges at the moment, but in overall it does feel slick, nicely designed and easy to use. The automatic good admin generation is a huge time saver, and the generic views look potentially very powerful too.
Posted by Andrew Brehaut at Sat Jul 30 18:24:21 2005

I'll just insert the obligatory note that jEdit has almost every single feature TextMate has, as well as a few extras. Plus, jEdit is cross-platform and free.

As far as I can tell by glancing through the TextMate website, the only real "advantages" it has over jEdit is that it's a Cocoa application, which gives it all the requisite tie-ins what with Services and so on; plus, it's slightly more intelligent about auto-completion of quotation marks.

An interesting fact of note I just looked up: jEdit's .dmg installer is only 0.1 MB larger than TextMate's, and the .jar is 1.4 MB smaller.

Oh... there are also the free and indispensible Proggy programming fonts.
Posted by Ben Karel at Sun Jul 31 10:41:52 2005

I'm just making the transition from scripting in Perl to scripting in Ruby, and I must say that I have underestimated the power of Ruby - array elements such as strings and numbers are for example treated as real objects and can be modified in place, cf. gsub!. Another RubyOnRails alternative btw is www.nitrohq.com and yet another text editor for Mac OS X is smultron.sourceforge.net !
Posted by Jo at Tue Aug 2 02:41:21 2005

Ruby fans should also check out Yet Another Ruby VM at www.atdot.net/yarv/
Posted by Kendal at Tue Aug 2 02:56:27 2005

Want to compare some programming languages? Look here: pleac.sourceforge.net (including example code for Python, Ruby, OCAML, etc. and some good further links) For a cool prog written in OCAML see the mtasc.org (Motion-Twin Action Script Compiler)! Those interested in Ruby code examples may also go to www.rubyquiz.com !
Posted by Tim at Tue Aug 2 03:09:51 2005

Want to compare some programming languages? Look here: pleac.sourceforge.net (including example code for Python, Ruby, OCAML, etc. and some good further links) For a cool prog written in OCAML see the mtasc.org (Motion-Twin Action Script Compiler)! Those interested in Ruby code examples may also go to www.rubyquiz.com !
Posted by Tim at Tue Aug 2 03:10:04 2005