Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 17th November 2007 12:28


On 16 Nov 2007, at 10:51, Gary Short wrote:
> On 16 Nov 2007 10:44:29 -0000, Richard Harrison wrote
>> Maybe I'm missing something but Rails looks excellent at building
>> something from scratch, but where there is an existing something (in
>> one case a well designed database) it seemed to me that I feel
>> outside of Rails.
>
> Providing your database conforms to certain rules, you can use rake
> migrate
> to use it within rails

Gary, Richard,

Rake migrate is a tool to migrate a database between certain version
numbers and certainly doesn't have anything to do with migrating an
existing database.
Rails uses certain conventions for the database but, at the end of the
day, they are only conventions. For example, a column named 'id' is
the primary key by default. But this does not stop you from naming it
different. Same applies for all the other Rails db-related conventions.
Also, you might be able to create some custom sql and migrate your
data into a new structure. From my experience, any db that can't be
easily integrated into a Rails project has problems (not normalised
properly, invalid structures, etc.)
If you need more details or if you need help with migrating an
existing database, I'll happy to help.

Paul