Rails 3: Django with a funny syntax

[elfs]

From the announcements for Rails 3:

The upcoming version 3 of Ruby on Rails will feature a sexy new querying API from ActiveRecord. Here is an example:

User.order('users.id DESC').limit(20).includes(:items)

In other words, Rails is now Django.

Also:

• Each application now has it’s own name space, application is started with YourAppName.boot for example, makes interacting with other applications a lot easier.
• Rails 3.0 now provides a Rails.config object, which provides a central repository of all sorts of Rails wide configuration options.

In other words, Rails is now Django.

To be fair, these are huge improvements to Rails. They’ve needed to do these things for a long, long time. The separation of application namespaces is especially powerful– it’s what gives Django a massive chunk of it’s dynamism. It’s good to see that these great ideas, which have been in Django since version 2, have now made it into Rails, just as the Django people start grappling with their own version of Capistrano (Fabric) and their own deployment issues. Rails’ migration path has always been obvious, a pythonic value, while Django has two migration tools (South and Evolution), which is more a rubyish value, and the Django team has decided to leave migration tracks up to outside development teams may-the-best-solution-win.

So, we’ll see. I’m installing Rails 3 this morning, and who knows?  Maybe it’ll seduce me back to working with Rails again.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Comments

[cadetstar.livejournal.com]

I thought the first was already possible, just with different syntax unless I'm missing something:

User.find(:all, :order => 'id DESC', :limit => 20, :include => :items)

Could be wrong, though. I don't do too much active loading of associations since I normally work with fairly lightweight databases.

The rest sounds interesting. When I do my next project I may have to move my development instance up to the most recent version to try it out.

-Michael