Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

akitaonrails.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 213 posts

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#101

Post by pbowyer »

busterarm wrote: post #72
singlow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason it matters more to web developers is that often our clients and employers do care what we use and if we love a particular tool it needs widespread adoption to be able to use it on real work. I have potential clients asking constantly if I can build their project with WordPress or Rails or Drupal or Symphony or whatever else they think is the best. It would be much better if they just came and asked…

WordPress is a valid question/option for them if they have a large amount of content they have to add using their marketing staff instead of more expensive developer consultants. It also is if they don't have a years-long working relationship with you, because who is going to maintain all of this when you're gone? At least if they have to dump your work and build a new theme, they don't have to worry about figuring o…

> WordPress done the right way uses plugins sparingly to get the job done, outside of obvious ones like Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Post 2 Post Links.

We don't give credit to how good some plugins are, either.

In my current web app I've had to add user-defined custom fields to a few entities. It's been a nightmare (Symfony2's form library isn't designed with this in mind) and the user experience is nowhere near as nice as ACF.

And for web apps, the user experience is as important as what it does. I wouldn't want to build this application on WordPress, but having components like ACF already present, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel, is making me seriously consider it for the next project.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#102

Post by dec0dedab0de »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #95
holografix wrote: post #80

Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django. Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, really liked what I saw in the Zen of Python. Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.

I have to agree here. Its a good thing that Django doesn't have the kind of overwhelming power that Rails has in the community, which is pretty awesome! There's a lot of diversity, like flask, pyramid and others; although Django does have a large part of the pie.

I think he was saying thay Django has a relatively small part in the overall Python pie.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#103

Post by mgkimsal »

mtbcoder wrote: post #100
busterarm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress is a valid question/option for them if they have a large amount of content they have to add using their marketing staff instead of more expensive developer consultants. It also is if they don't have a years-long working relationship with you, because who is going to maintain all of this when you're gone? At least if they have to dump your work and build a new theme, they don't have to worry about figuring o…

> WP isn't bad per-se From a data standpoint, yes, WP is bad. Really bad. The poor quality code base of WP is only one half of the equation. The other half is the downright awful, novice database schema that ships with it. I've never seen a database schema that is so tightly coupled with the parent application that it essentially hijacks your data into always needing itself simply to extract and render data. WP takes…

it's some bad db choices at core that get multiplied to many other plugins as well. and... sessions in the database - why are they in wp_options? Still to this day that makes no sense to me.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#105

Post by scandox »

EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

They're not arguing about technology as such, they're arguing about productivity. The specific problems are not hard, just the organisation and maintenance of the parts. So it does probably matter a lot for this kind of work.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#106

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #59
EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though. How not to get tangled in your own mess when customer is breathing down your neck. Almost every language provides you with sufficient tools for writing algorithms, doing calculations, storing and accessing data, but almost none gives you solutions for avoiding mess. There are many ideas on how to avoid mess but none of them works and people a…

[deleted]

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#107

Post by Retric »

rgbrgb wrote: post #85
scotty79 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though. How not to get tangled in your own mess when customer is breathing down your neck. Almost every language provides you with sufficient tools for writing algorithms, doing calculations, storing and accessing data, but almost none gives you solutions for avoiding mess. There are many ideas on how to avoid mess but none of them works and people a…

> Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though. Kind of a strange way to put it but I think I agree with the gist. Scaling is the web's hard problem. Building an ever expanding list of features while measuring if users like them and delivering them via cheap computers and tiny pipes is surprisingly difficult. Scaling a rigidly defined web system on it's own generally isn't so hard at thi…

Systems always get more complex as you add features. At best you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot, but that's ok because none of your competitors can avoid the same issues.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#108

Post by akor »

mtbcoder wrote: post #100
busterarm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress is a valid question/option for them if they have a large amount of content they have to add using their marketing staff instead of more expensive developer consultants. It also is if they don't have a years-long working relationship with you, because who is going to maintain all of this when you're gone? At least if they have to dump your work and build a new theme, they don't have to worry about figuring o…

> WP isn't bad per-se From a data standpoint, yes, WP is bad. Really bad. The poor quality code base of WP is only one half of the equation. The other half is the downright awful, novice database schema that ships with it. I've never seen a database schema that is so tightly coupled with the parent application that it essentially hijacks your data into always needing itself simply to extract and render data. WP takes…

@mtbcoder I always thought WordPress's schema issues were a function of it trying to be generic enough that it can accommodate everyones "vision". What are examples of it's "novice database schema"?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#109

Post by elbear »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #102
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree here. Its a good thing that Django doesn't have the kind of overwhelming power that Rails has in the community, which is pretty awesome! There's a lot of diversity, like flask, pyramid and others; although Django does have a large part of the pie.

I think he was saying thay Django has a relatively small part in the overall Python pie.

As in web development plays a small part in everything Python. Python's scientific use comes to mind as a strong alternative.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#110

Post by girishso »

bdcravens wrote: post #73

These days, I'm finding a lot of joy in taking parts of a Rails app that feel clunky (meaning they usually aren't Basecamp-like, and I find myself using a lot of magic and config to make it fit a Rails-shaped hole), extracting it out as a stand-alone Sinatra app that uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord, gemifying it, and then pulling it back into the parent monolith as an engine.

Wow! I didn't know Rails engines can be written in Sinatra/Sequel. Wondering how that works exactly.
Post reply on HN