Hobo - Rails Application Builder

[Anurag Priyam]

Hello all,

Today afternoon I tried out an application builder for Rails. Its called Hobo and is available as gem( name: hobo ). It automatically generates nice to look, and customizable views( by inspecting the models ) with its templating language DRYML. I quite liked it. Another nifty feature it has is the concept of lifecycle of a model, where you  define the states of a model, hot it transcends from one state to another, and what actions are to be taken when a models state changes. Hobo comes with a permission system and the way of defining models. You declare all the fields in app/models/something.rb and it automatically generates migrations for you.

Have you guys use Hobo? I would love to gain some valuable feedback and discussion from you all on Hobo.

--
Anurag Priyam
2nd Year,Mechanical Engineering,
IIT Kharagpur.
+91-9775550642

[Noufal Ibrahim]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Anurag Priyam <anurag0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Today afternoon I tried out an application builder for Rails. Its called
> Hobo and is available as gem( name: hobo ). It automatically generates nice
> to look, and customizable views( by inspecting the models ) with its
> templating language DRYML. I quite liked it. Another nifty feature it has is
> the concept of lifecycle of a model, where you  define the states of a
> model, hot it transcends from one state to another, and what actions are to
> be taken when a models state changes. Hobo comes with a permission system
> and the way of defining models. You declare all the fields in
> app/models/something.rb and it automatically generates migrations for you.

Sorry if this hijacks your thread.

I haven't use Hobo. I haven't use rails (for that matter, I haven't
even used Ruby much) but the whole idea of these magical tools that
build applications for you is getting a tad scary. Rails itself (if
it's similar to the clones that it inspired in the Python worlds)
takes away a lot of control over your app so that you can create it
faster. Now, there's a rails app. builder that adds a layer of magic
above this?

I've met people who've hyper specialised in a single language and
that's crippling them. Getting hooked onto a single framework or tool
feels like a more lethal variant of that.

While Hobo itself might be an excellent tool and a worthwhile project,
these whole 'wizard style' development has spawned legions of
programmers who don't really understand the subtleties of programming
and who feel like they're professionals because the the framework did
all the work. It's an unhealthy trend and sadly IMHO a growing one.
[..]

--
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in

[Martin DeMello]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <nou...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> While Hobo itself might be an excellent tool and a worthwhile project,
> these whole 'wizard style' development has spawned legions of
> programmers who don't really understand the subtleties of programming
> and who feel like they're professionals because the the framework did
> all the work. It's an unhealthy trend and sadly IMHO a growing one.
> [..]

The flip side to that discussion is that any project involves *lots*
of code that adds no real value to the core idea behind your app, and
is (or can be) pretty much the same from app to app. Wizards and other
such cookie-cutter-code generators simply handle all that for you,
leaving you to concentrate on the problem you're really trying to
solve. If the design is part of your USP, then, of course, you
wouldn't want your webapp to look and feel just like every other hobo
webapp out there, but if you're solving a different problem entirely
and just want to put some sort of a web frontend in front of it to act
as some sort of UI, wizard-style development can be a wonderful thing
indeed.

martin

[Saurabh Bhatia]

Yup and some times stripping extra code from the app is more painful than
developing from scratch specially if some plugins or generators have loads of code in them and only
some of it is required.

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Saurabh

[Anurag Priyam]

Sorry if this hijacks your thread.

 
Well it does, but,  I value your opinion a lot so that does not matter :).

I haven't use Hobo. I haven't use rails (for that matter, I haven't
even used Ruby much) but the whole idea of these magical tools that
build applications for you is getting a tad scary. Rails itself (if
it's similar to the clones that it inspired in the Python worlds)
takes away a lot of control over your app so that you can create it
faster. Now, there's a rails app. builder that adds a layer of magic
above this?

 

You are right in saying that Hobo adds another layer of magic over rails. What I liked was few of their ideas: their approach of templating, which if isolated from hobo could be used just like erb or haml, lifecycle of model and some small stuff. I was expecting to get comments on the advantages, utility or practicality of those ideas. Some of the frameworks have been extracted from practical projects and their plugins developed when some developer felt a need. Its your requirements and experience that judge the use of any of these( or any tool ).

 

I've met people who've hyper specialised in a single language and
that's crippling them. Getting hooked onto a single framework or tool
feels like a more lethal variant of that.

While Hobo itself might be an excellent tool and a worthwhile project,
these whole 'wizard style' development has spawned legions of
programmers who don't really understand the subtleties of programming
and who feel like they're professionals because the the framework did
all the work. It's an unhealthy trend and sadly IMHO a growing one.
[..]

I can assure you that I am not one of those programmers. I had( and have ) the guidance of some really awesome( read, real ) programmers to stop me from going that track :D.

[Swanand Pagnis]

I agree with Martin.

I can see the point against the magical frameworks (read: do-stuff-in-background-while-you-sleep). But original idea was to not re-invent the wheel. So as long as these frameworks allow you to be familiar with the wheel, w/o you needing to re-invent it, I guess its okay. My point in simpler words is, using these frameworks is really fine as long as you know what is it really doing (which I understand can be extremely hard sometimes).

--

[C. K. Ponnappa]

> Have you guys use Hobo?

Yes, I've used Hobo, but almost two years ago now. I'm not sure what the
state of the project is now, but at that point it was a complete
straight-jacket without a clear objective. It wasn't trying to help me
build a particular _kind_ of web app (like say community engine,
mephisto or spree) nor did it give me enough flexibility to custom build
a web app. At that point in time it was an example of convention over
configuration taken to an extreme which rendered the project useless for
more than toy apps.

Perhaps things have changed now?

Cheers,
Sidu.
http://blog.sidu.in
http://twitter.com/ponnappa