Rails Progress

I picked up a copy of Rails for Java Developers by Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland and am playing around more with Rails. The book is really good, but I really need a migration guide from Hibernate to Rails (or an existing web application to Rails). I'm looking for more information on creating Rails models that can be accessed through a complex set of filters and associations. The things I need to know are:
  • How to create something like a 8 table Rails join?
  • How best to represent lookup tables?
  • What options are available to tune the queries? Can I capture the Rails query before it's sent to the DB for debugging (outside the MySQL log)?
  • How do I specify things like limit, paging, group by, sum, distinct, etc?
I'm going to reread the ActiveRecord chapter of this book again. I also have a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails on the way.

Many articles I'm finding on the Internet draw the same conclusions - if your schema and object dependencies are not too complex Rails is the way to go... otherwise use Hibernate. Some of these articles are a little dated though (2005).

I did learn about some cool features built into Rails that I'd like to use, so I'm not giving up hope yet. These include
  • schema versioning (and rollback)
  • migration support between various database implementations (is this available in Hibernate?)
I hope to have an answer to some of these questions soon.

More Info

Hibernate vs. Rails: The Persistence Showdown
Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both?
Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited (Part 2)

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