[OSM-dev] Ruby developers in Amsterdam

[Frederik Ramm]

Martijn,

> The goal of the talk will be to interest the (Amsterdam) Ruby  
> community in OSM in general, but also in becoming involved in OSM  
> Rails development. Is that helpful?

My personal take on this is that we actually have two, very different, 
kinds of "web interface", or better "http interface".

One is talking to users - letting them register, write blogs, write 
messages (and if the trend continues, one day they'll be able to upload 
images, have multi-page user profiles and forums and a full-blown E-Mail 
system all within OSM). This part includes minor database activity, like 
storing user preferences in a table when the user requests it. This is 
the part where a Rails-like system excels, but it is not in any way 
mission critical for us and could also be done in a scripting language 
or web templating system of your choice.

The other is the hard-core database part where we're not talking to 
humans at their web browsers but to editors or other clients which want 
to download or upload data. We talk XML, not HTML, here, and we have 
massive database activity; here, the API is actually just a rather thin 
REST layer on top of the database. And this is where, in my eyes, the 
whole Rails migrations and ActiveRecord automatism is of no use at all 
and is in fact circumvented more than it is used. This part should 
probably be separated from the rest and implemented in an old-fashioned 
compiled language.

In my eyes, OSM is not a "typical Rails project", nor even a project 
where Rails can demonstrate superiority to anything else. In parts, OSM 
is even a "we're Rails here but it's really not optimal" project.

Bye
Frederik