Re: What are the weaknesses in Ruby?

On 30/04/2008, Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 30 Apr 2008, at 17:27, Phillip Gawlowski wrote:

The web is only good at, in its current form, for CRUD.

And that doesn't even touch on the issue of graceful downgrading.

Silverlight/Moonlight or Flash would make that possible. But those are
much more virtual machines like the JRE or .NET (especially
Silverlight), than than a HTML rendering engine.


Much of the problem is that a Web Browser is not suited to being an
application platform, even though the major browsers have grown into such.
Beyond a certain level of application complexity a choice has to be made
between a hardline REST approach with minimal markup and styling, or a
lightweight client delivered as Flash, Silverlight of Java Applet content
inside a browser page. Both approaches have their problems and for many
kinds of applications such as casual games I can see an argument for
developing dedicated clients and ignoring the browser altogether.


I have written a data entry application in PHP (+JS)(because it is the
only supported relatively secure scripting solution on our server). It
was a port of a DOS FoxPro (or whatever is the 'engine' called)
application. Admittedly the forms are as crude as they were in DOS,
and the tab order is linear. But you get UTF-8, and relatively fast
searches (especially if the result is small). And it works in both FF
and IE so it is quite portable, but I had to implement some parts of
the JS separately for each browser.

As the amount of data entered is small (a few records per day) the
portability is a win. If I had a dedicated server I could write the
application in Ruby but it is not the case. Still for more intensive
use the response times of a web application would be unacceptable.

I don't like stuff like flash for anything important. The renderer is
not free and therefore does not work on many 'more exotic' platforms,
at least not easily. Flash games or cool demos are OK, they either
happen to work or you find something else. But there the usefulness
ends.

GUIs are quite hard to do programatically from scratch, and GUI
builders aren't the easiest thing to work with. One that is quite
acceptable is distributed with DeveloperTools for OS X. Using that
you can make flexible dialogs (or windows with multiple controls) that
expand and contract reasonably with some effort.

It is not very clever by itself but you can specify which parts should
be fixed, and which extensible, and there are many alignment options
to keep stuff together. So far I have not seen any GUI builder that
would do that for me.

And seeing that most dialogs on other platforms are fixed size and
don't react properly when they are localized (changing text length),
the font size changes, or the dialog is forced to expand It would seem
that most GUI builders do not allow to make reasonably flexible
dialogs.

There is another question if dialogs are the desirable communication
tool at all but these are "state of the art", and most users won't
accept any experimental GUI solution anyway.

The most interesting thing for Ruby is probably Shoes right now. It is
supposed to focus on simplicity for both users and programmers using
well known UI elements. I have tried some experimental demo some time
ago. It looked interesting but there were still some rough edges.


Thanks

Michal

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: MS Silverlight Clues
    ... Flash and Zen are in two different buckets for me, ... then get a new browser and ... ... I meant Silverlight coding in the XML ... Shockwave/Flash, Java Applets, and now Silverlight, all have a code ...
    (comp.databases.pick)
  • Re: What are the weaknesses in Ruby?
    ... Silverlight/Moonlight or Flash would make that possible. ... Silverlight), than than a HTML rendering engine. ... Java Applet content inside a browser page. ... problems and for many kinds of applications such as casual games I can ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: Question: tools for business apps development
    ... >>One of possibilities is to use Flash (in a browser) for GUI. ... in the JavaScript implementations on different browsers. ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_Wie=3F_Programm_in_bel._Browser_ausf=FChren?=
    ... Der Anbieter dieses Programms möchte jetzt, ... Im Normalfall darf der Browser nix unsicheres ausführen... ... Sollte ich lieber mit Flash oder Silverlight ...
    (microsoft.public.de.vc)
  • Re: Question: tools for business apps development
    ... >> One of possibilities is to use Flash (in a browser) for GUI. ... > server in Java and all messages were exchanged as XML. ...
    (comp.lang.python)