Phobos vs Rails

Summer time is very busy with outdoor activities, family vacations, and spending time enjoying the great outdoors. It is refreshing to step back and then come back to networks and computer systems with a little different perspective on problems and solutions.

I have been working on a test project with MSSQL and Phobos. I am using the MS JDBC driver, JPA and Phobos JPA generator. I have to compliment the Phobos team on the ease of use of the Phobos platform and focus on productivity of the developer. I see a lot of buzz about Ruby and Rails. When comparing Rails and Phobos so far, it seems that Phobos has just as much, if not more productivity with a greater simplicity.

An example of hooking up a page to a database would be to create your tables in your database, Create a project in Netbeans and run the JPA wizard, compile and build the JPA project. Add the JPA class to your Phobos project, and run the JPA generator Phobos provides. You now have a basic interface and all the infrastructure code for reading, updating, and deleting records. You can now focus on the presentation area of your web project instead of spending time writing infrastructure code.

While the Phobos team is still rounding out the platform, the simplicity and usability already really shines. With web developers using client side javascript, server side javascript is a natural choice for the server side as well.

Be sure to check out the JPA wizard on the Phobos web site at https://phobos.dev.java.net/tutorials/jpagenerator/index.html