Competing with Ruby On Rails

thread: 5 messages  |  last: about 5 years ago  |  started: wednesday, april 5, 2006, 10:59 am pdt


#1  |  Ed Syrett (Milton Keynes, UK.)
Wednesday, April 5, 2006, 10:59 AM PDT

Hello All,

We are in the process of evaluating frameworks and technologies to use for our next generation apps.  These need to be thin-client, and multiplatform, so we discounted ASP.NET ..:-D  I've been looking at Ruby On Rails, and it's very feature rich.  But it currently suffers from a lack of decent development tools.  Also I really have a problem with the syntax of Ruby (ex C++/C# hacker..)  

So I'd really like to consider PHP as an alternative, and Qcodo goes a long way to providing the same level of functionality as Rails. The framework itself is missing a bunch of stuff that I suspect is available in other PHP libraries, but I guess I'm just asking whether these things are planned for incorporation in the framework:

- Session storage in file or db.

- Logging support - I've seen log4php - could that be integrated into the framework?  BTW I didn't notice any code in the framework that actually logs to anything, eg to give performance stats like how long it took in the call, or what SQL it fired off...

- The Prototype library in Rails has a nice drop list thing where you can type in the first few characters of a string in a textbox and have a div appear below it with all the values from a table starting with those characters.  We would definitely use this in our app.  Could this be integrated into the QTextbox class?

Thanks,

Ed.

#2  |  Mike Ho (San Diego, CA) United States of America Qcodo Administrator
Wednesday, April 5, 2006, 1:19 PM PDT

Ed,

Thanks for your post!  The short answer to your question is, yes -- all three feature line-items that you've listed is on the list of things that we want to add into the Framework.

More specifically, logging will probably be integrated soon.

The hooks for session storage are already in place (e.g. there's a UseSession constant preference in the QForm class), and internally, we already built one prototype which works decently, but we're trying to clean it up a bit before putting it into the core.

For the textbox, i think you're talking about an autocomplete textbox, similar to google suggest (http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en) ?  Actually, everything is already in place for you to be able to create your own QControl (which would likely extend from QTextBox) to do something like that.  We were hoping to have a QAutoCompleteTextBox control as an official part of the core... but no one has been able to work on it yet.  (e.g. the example at http://examples.qcodo.com/examples/events_actions/delayed.php at least shows the beginning of having PHP methods called via AJAX whenever stuff is typed into a textbox -- this new control would basically just expand on that php method)

In terms of the larger question of which direction to go... I think you can't really go wrong with any of the great frameworks out there, whether it'd be Rails, or any of the other PHP frameworks like Cake, Symfony or PRADO.  I personally feel there are some advantages to a PHP-based framework over a Java/.NET/Ruby one (in terms of the language construct, itself, as well as the massive library of open source components you can download), but to each his/her own.

Specifically for Qcodo, I feel that the Qform library is a compelling architecture for the view/control layer of your application, and i think the concept of stateful, event-driven web forms (also seen in ASP.NET, JavaServer Faces, PRADO and XForms) is going to continue to grow as frameworks begin to incorporate the architecutre more and more.

Also, the one very different aspect of Qcodo vs. the other ORM-based frameworks is its use of Code Generation vs. runtime reflection to create your object relational model.  You can see http://www.qcodo.com/documentation/article.php/6 for more about this.

Obviously, we'd like it if you went with Qcodo =), but to be honest, despite these architectural differences I listed, most of them offer (in terms of functionality) more or less the thing, and I really don't think there's a “wrong” choice.

Because you're investing the time to ramp up in and architect your system on a solid framework of any kind, I think you've already made the “right” choice. =)

Good luck w/ your decision.

--Mike

#3  |  MrSupplier
Monday, June 19, 2006, 4:18 PM PDT

- Session storage in file or db.

There's pretty good php extension for storing sessions in mysql, just FYI

#4  |  MrSupplier
Monday, June 19, 2006, 4:18 PM PDT

- Session storage in file or db.

There's pretty good php extension for storing sessions in mysql, just FYI

#5  |  Mike Ho (San Diego, CA) United States of America Qcodo Administrator
Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 3:25 PM PDT

yes -- there are.

I'm sorry: to clarify, what i meant to say was the Qform fomrstate storage into session or the file system -- which is definitely now available.  You can store formstate on the page, in PHP session, or in the filesystem.

In terms of the PHP session handling, itself, there are many options out there in the PHP world to switch session storage from the filesystem into the DB, memory, shared file storage, etc.



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