I Beat Ruby on Rails by 6 Months
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Join For FreeWaay back in 2003, I got tired of writing the same boilerplate crud apps
and longed for a "better way to do things" so I wrote a rapid
development framework called thrust.
It used turbine, velocity, and torque to build an entire web
application scaffold from an xml database schema definition. I look at
the code now and kinda chuckle and shake my head, but something I
realized is that it predates the public release of ruby on rails by a
good six months.
Moreover it predates the closest allegory I can find in the java space
(Spring Roo) by a good 6-7 years!
I'm not just tooting my own horn, because I remember talking to other
people who all said things like "we should just use conventions" and
"this stuff is just boilerplate, why don't we generate/template it?",
but it seems like most folks just built internal-only proprietary
solutions.
Couple of lessons/observations:
#1 promotion is everything... rails languished in relative obscurity
until some folks started evangalizing it. My solution died on the vine
as I moved on to bigger and better things.
#2 Timing is important, but not MOST important. Being first can be an
advantage or a liablilty. Grails got to learn from rails and avoid some
of the wonkiness (for example).
#3 Some times it's good to go back and look at what you've done for
inspiration. I had forgotten about velocity templates...which are
pretty useful. I also didn't realize that Maven (arrgh) originated form
the Turbine project (which is what my framework was built upon).
#4 Great ideas seem to burst on the market in a short period of time
and one or two solutions seem to end up dominating. It seems that tech
trends infect large numbers of developers simultaneously and then go
away.
Source: http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-beat-ruby-on-rails-by-6-months.html
Source: http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-beat-ruby-on-rails-by-6-months.html
Web application
XML database
Velocity (JavaScript library)
Framework
Grail (web browser)
app
Schema
Release (agency)
Space (architecture)
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