Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial
Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial
Rails is a capable Web application platform and has, in less than two years, gained significant traction among J2EE and PHP programmers. The attraction of both J2EE and PHP programmers makes a lot of sense when you look at the strengths of Rails. For one thing, it uses a strict model-view-controller architecture that any self-respecting design-patterns wonk would admire—this explains its attraction to J2EE developers. Second, it’s easy to build basic systems with Rails—which is attractive to PHP developers.
However, Rails has some pretty significant limitations from a database perspective. Rails makes a lot of assumptions about your database layout and application needs. For example, Rails assumes that all tables use a single, non-compound, primary key. Compound primary keys are not supported! In addition, Rails does not support two-phase commit; it supports multiple databases, but cannot coordinate transactions among them.
This article is not intended to be a booster piece for Rails nor is it an expose. It’s simply an introduction to the technology. It contains both praise and criticism. At times the criticism might appear a bit heavy handed (especially to Rails enthusiasts), but don’t be fooled. Using any Web application framework is going to be tricky, whether it’s J2EE, ASP.NET, or PHP. In the long run, you can be a lot more productive with Rails than you can be with many other Web application development platforms, but it takes time to learn the ropes.
