Anyway, keep up the good work!

The point is that Rails is designed almost entirely for web developers, no longer tied to trying to satisfy a computer's needs. For example, in your ManageList.java, to create a list you do:

List list = getSubmissionBean(List.class); list.setOwnerId(getIdentity().getAttributes().getUserId());

Which will create a list object and set the owner of it to the current user. That's all well and good, but in Rails, this would be:

user.lists.create

Now please don't misunderstand, I am NOT talking about LOC here, but it truly is examples like this that make Rails innovative. You are not writing things just so a computer can know what to do, you are writing them so that you know what to do. The less you have to worry about, the easier it is to maintain, extend, and think about other more important things.

If you don't care about the fact that you are serving the compiler instead of vise-versa, then there is nothing innovative about Rails and you can move on.

In the above example, you have references to Java beans, classes, attributes, identities, and ids. These are all very important things, but they are important for the computer to keep track of. Rails is about letting you focus on things that you need to keep track of.

Good points about the security flaws in Tada-list by the way. Shame on David for not thinking that through.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of firewall problem that doesn't allow the Laszlo GUI to communicate with the server.

List list = getSubmissionBean(List.class); list.setOwnerId(getIdentity().getAttributes().getUserId());

and

user.lists.create

Thank you.

Too bad. Laszlo sucks, I suppose.

You just have to - please - swear - promise - that you'll do a clone of Basecamp now in just 3 weeks or so. GPL'ed of course.

Maybe that will finally silence DHH and his drones.

Second: nice application, I do not particularly appreciate flash, but this is nice, especially because of the source code.

Then: why are you doing this dumb thing, guys? You both look like 10 years old.

Geert, what are you trying to prove? You just showed that:

• you can use rife to build something like tadalist
• you'll end up having code half the size longer, even if your framework has been around for so much time than rails
• there is a 10% more code of "imports" which rails handles for you and you graciously omitted (why? do we all use your same tool that automagically build them for you? does the source of the ide counts in this game?)
• you artificially tried to compress the code, like onelined setters/getters wich does not seem to fit your common style of coding, if its true that

David, you showed:

• you can write tadalist
• you can do comparisons with no meaning, since you don't show the full logic
• obviously if the size of the app is 600 lines you have code in other place, and the ratio should be 3/2 not 14/1. So please show the place where Geert's code is half of the size of your, since it must exist.
• you can piss off a whole community which you could have caught to your cause

Thanks for catching this, I simply forgot to catch and display the error in Laszlo. It's fixed.

Ok, show me, without changing anything on the server-side. Back this one up for a change. Of course this is difficult, since nobody has ever seen the Ta-da List code.

Wait a minute, then how the hell did it take you 900 even with your clever "I'm going to use flash and say you don't count the view (even though I have to maintain this code now)" strategy.

Geert, I understand you want to protect your job, but does it have to be at the cost of your integrity?

In fact, it would not be that hard to put Geert in his place by writing a Rails backend for his Laszlo frontend. Anybody up to this task and then open-sourcing it so we can talk real shop?

"I suspect that some of the people who “get” how to use metaprogramming in Ruby also get how to do declarative programming with the Laszlo features."

Oliver Steele says Laszlo has declarative programming capabilities. And I quote:

"There are two approaches to programming called imperative programming and declarative programming. Imperative programming gives a list of instructions to execute in a particular order -- Java program that counts the number of words in a text file is an example of the imperative approach. Declarative programming describes a set of conditions, and lets the system figure out how to fulfill them. The SQL statement SELECT COUNT(*) FROM XYZ is an example for the declarative approach. In other words, "specifying how" describes imperative programming and "specifying what is to be done, not how" describes declarative programming."

If you say that declarative programming contains no logic, then SQL contains no logic. Thus as a logical consequence, if one were to put SQL commands right into the view layer, you would still have no "logic" in the view. However, not even you would agree that putting SQL in your view is a good idea. That is because SQL is considered business logic and thus belongs in the model or controller. If SQL is considered logic, and SQL is an instance of declarative programming, then declarative programming has to be considered logic. If declarative programming programming is considered logic, then Laszlo puts logic in the view layer. Blabla list uses Laszlo and thus has logic in the view layer. QED

How is that for my logical proof of the day.

http://osteele.com/images/2005/ruby-and-laszlo.png

Which puts Laszlo in the category of a client side object oriented programming language. How would you explain to Oliver that an object oriented programming language is free of logic?

The current Laszlo client is just a client, in the same way as your browser is a client for HTML output. If you prefer reading XML, like text, and don't want a GUI (you never known), you can just use Curl as a client and type in the REST methods and parameters yourself.

The logic in the Laszlo client is logic that is totally isolated from templates of the servlet tier, actually they have nothing to do one with the other. Now do your homework in the future and stop wasting people's time.

If you agree that it is declarative programming, do you think that declarative programming has no logic?

For the others, I'm done with replying, I think everything has been covered.

Re 1: you doing RIFE as a hobby - look at who makes money off RIFE, and who gives Rails out for free. Then talk about hobbies. Make RIFE freely available, and one of my biggest gripes with it will disappear. Rails has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type) for me: I get no money for it, and it's not even part of any of my studies in the university. I've done it all on my own time, and on my own machine.

Re 2: your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of RIFE. I can only hope (and assume) that Laszlo doesn't suck like RIFE does.