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I think the killer feature for a lot of developers when Rails came around was the ORM. IIRC AolServer didn't have an equivalent to ActiveRecord, and never havin
by mhd 9y ago
I think the killer feature for a lot of developers when Rails came around was the ORM. IIRC AolServer didn't have an equivalent to ActiveRecord, and never having to touch SQL or know a lot about database design was a big boon for the kind of developer who got into RoR. The rest was mostly more magical PHP.
- pjmlp 9y agoAolServer might not had one, but Vignette and our in-house solution surely did. You would declare an "entity" type and all CRUD operations would be automatically generated for Informix, MS SQL Server, Sybase SQL Server, Oracle and DB 2. With the possibility of extending with extra queries that look like entity methods.
- look_lookatme 9y agoMost ORMs I dealt with at the time were strict code generation from configuration or db introspection, so there was essentially a 'compilation step'. What AR had at the time was you extended a base class and directed it to a database and your objects magically figured everything else out. Change a table schema and refresh _only_ your browser and the new state was reflected in your application. That was a very magical in 2006 and having a fully working ORM with 2-6 lines of _code_ (not configuration) per schema+relationship was incredible.
- pjmlp 9y agoOur 'compilation step' was at application startup, restarting the server was enough, in 1999.
- look_lookatme 9y agoAll may be true but it clearly wasn't as easy to pick up as Ruby and Rails. [edit] Oh right, your in-house solution. Well congrats on having it figured out in 1999.
- pjmlp 9y agoVignette could also do it. Digging a bit on past memories, http://www.tcl.tk/customers/success/vignette.tml http://www.tcl.tk/customers/success/vignette.tml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StoryServer