OK, I broke down and started playing with Ruby on Rails, the MVC framework-du-jour.
Stuff I like so far:
- Rapid Development
- Some stuff feels a lot like Cocoon
Stuff I don’t like:
- Ruby code embedded in views — You have got to be kidding me!
- All of the ActionXXXXX terminology stolen from Struts. Give it up already! ActionXXXXX is worthless, and makes stuff seem more important than it is. Just call stuff what they are.
- Having to run stuff as a CGI
- ActiveRecord looks like it pollutes your object model
So far, I’m impressed. There’s a lot of stuff RoR could learn from Cocoon, and vice versa, I think. I’m not too fond of the Active Record pattern, I’d much rather use a DAO to store objects. I’m sure it’s easy to implement a DAO to use in Rails, but I think they should have made using a DAO as easy as using an ActiveRecord.
That being said, I’m still going to play with RoR, and I might start even using it to prototype stuff before developing things with Cocoon. Rails might have Cocoon beat with respect to Model, and maybe even controller (hmm.. actually not.). Cocoon beats the pants off Rails when it comes to view rendering though.