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What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

yehudakatz.com

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Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#71

Post by mnutt »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #18

I appreciate the post and am a huge fan of Yehuda, he used my comments as teeing off points for your remarks but I feel that what I was trying to say has been lost in his response, probably because I was unclear. Lets start with this ... "The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it’s a personal playground" This was said more in frustration with the coffeescript/sass decision than any real belief that…

Do assets in public/ break in 3.1? Sure, it's encouraged, but I'm pretty sure if you tell your web server to point to public/ it will serve your static assets from there. As far as I know you can upgrade your existing rails app from 3.0 to 3.1 and start using asset pipelining on your own schedule.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#72

Post by lifo »

jamesbritt wrote: post #59
ssmoot wrote: post #13

I'm not a fan of Rails myself, but I sympathize with Yehuda's position. The helpers are my #1 gripe with Rails. It really kills productivity to have to dig through all your views for what feels like pet changes. The one point Yehuda's making I'd dispute is the impact of Arel. I saw a very early version of Arel back when I was maintaining DataMapper. To be clear, Arel is beautiful code. It's ridiculously well done IMO…

Best of all worlds would have been to drop AR altogether and promote a migration to Sequel for the official Rails O/RM. ;-) Indeed. Or decouple the ORM entirely, though that likely removes a key aspect of what Rails is about. It is, however, what makes Ramaze so appealing. No coupling to any ORM, but there is a community inclination to use Sequel (so you can learn from example and there are people to answer questions…

You seem to know very little about Rails 3. But if you think ramaze has a "community", I guess I can understand why.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#73

Post by chernevik »

ayb wrote: post #47
SeanDav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that Yehuda is calm and makes good points - However the main point of the original article still remains intact - Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn, much harder than before.

>> Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn, much harder than before. I think that Rails is hard to learn for several reasons: * unless you've used it before, you have to learn Ruby too * Rails is fast moving and has a lot of pieces * the error messages can be cryptic and hard to decipher I've been developing with Ruby and Rails for several years now and I still encounter cryptic error messages. As a newbie I fou…

I found the Hartl RoR tutorial slow going, and couldn't parse whether my confusion was Rails, or Ruby, or REST concepts (& Rails implementation thereof), or TDD (which I found takes some getting used to). "Learning Rails" seems to involve learning some design practices and process tools that are less mandatory when learning other frameworks. But I'm just a newbie with some Python / Django familiarity, others may take to this stuff faster.

I have found those additions worthwhile. The work I've done in Django has gone a _lot_ faster, and I think better written, for the orientation to REST and TDD.

Perhaps real devs with more experience find these pieces less helpful and more intrusive?

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#74

Post by sams99 »

sebilasse wrote: post #34
Jd wrote: post #22

There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly. Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on o…

You can have your sexy app up in a couple of weeks. But maintaining it still takes time, no matter what language/framework you're using. Upgrading to a new version is in the end maintenance (security fixes, underlying framework improvements, and the refactorings that go hand in hand with upgrading). If you go with rails you still can get to a point very quick, with the downside that you have to spend time for upgradi…

The rails 2 -> rails 3 upgrade path is one of the most complex upgrade paths I have seen for a web framework

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#75

Post by sams99 »

What surprises me is that lack of backlash for the shoddy upgrade process...

Moving from Rails 2 to Rails 3 is a nightmare, a documented nightmare in 3 parts http://goo.gl/2Xw7n

Sure you can get part of the way by porting to bundler and upgrading to ruby 1.9.2, but there is no plugin or way to have an app work with both Rails 2 and Rails 3 at the same time. And this is a year after it was released with 3.1 just around the corner.

For the upgrade you need to change boot.rb, application.rb your routes and all your other configuration. Potentially you may need to update a ton of views to allow for the xss protection.

By themselves none of the changes in Rails 3 are bad, its just that somehow they managed to make it very very hard to upgrade, so less people use it, and it gets less testing and stuff regresses.

I think if the team focused on a bridge / integrated upgrade path for rails 2 that allows you to switch to rails 3 seamlessly it would do wonders for adoption.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#76

Post by chriseppstein »

kenjackson wrote: post #68
philwelch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

| For all the talk of freedom, this is disappointing.

You're incredibly naive then. Freedom comes from the license. You can fork and modify to your heart's content. This is how open source freedom works. If you think you can do it better, then do it better in your project. Rails is not some sort of public good that belongs to the people. It is a project that people work very hard on and then give away. And for anyone to suggest that they should not get to decide how things work on the thing that they give away free of charge and for modification is both ludicrous and makes you sound very ungrateful.

Successful projects are successful because the leaders do a good job. They're good at listening, good at saying no, good at rallying support, and good at working with their users and their team. Your vote is with your shoes.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#77

Post by chrstphrwrght »

chollida1 wrote: post #30
Jd wrote: post #22

There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly. Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on o…

> (1) If you are a Rails developer you need to be a full-time Rails developer and not do too much else. You can't do Rails and a bunch of other things because Rails will take up a lot of your time. I'm glad to see someone else say this. I don't use rails often, nor am I a "front end" developer by trade. I have put together some simple web apps using rails, but it seems that each time I go back to rails and try to use…

I've tinkered with Rails projects on and off since 2005, but it's never been my main gig. I'm sure if I was using it full-time I'd be okay keeping up to date with the latest trends and conventions, but as it stands I wind up Googling before almost every decision to ask "Okay, so how are we doing this now?"

I figure that infrequent users like us aren't who the Rails core is catering for, and that's fine. It does feel like a slow reboot coming back to Rails every 6-12 months for small projects, but I still recognise that it's a great framework that solves a lot of problems.

When making a decision on what technology to use, I often consider Sinatra for its simplicity. Rails feels like a black box to me at times - again, likely not a problem if it's your bread and butter.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#78

Post by ssmoot »

ssmoot wrote: post #49
gaius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the ORM is slow! Is there anyone in 2011 who doesn't know this? Why not bite the bullet and learn SQL? Your DBA will thank you.

A 10% performance penalty to get down and dirty with your Domain Model and go all HSQL isn't exactly a big price to pay. Take a peek at Paul's benchmark. Iterate and instantiated 100K empty objects in 10s. That's crazy. You're talking about something that would probably take 1ms in c#. You're talking about a performance deficit four orders of magnitude large. Regardless, I think you've entirely missed the point. The…

Here's the same in Java:

  public class dispatch {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
      long s = System.currentTimeMillis();

      int x = 0;
      for(int i = 0; i
Just for kicks. I'm not a Java developer but I'd like to get decent at it some day in the near future. Feel free to school me. ;-)

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#79

Post by philwelch »

kenjackson wrote: post #68
philwelch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

Have you ever organized, maintained, or contributed to any kind of open source project yourself, or are you speaking out of ignorance and idealism?

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#80

Post by kenjackson »

chriseppstein wrote: post #76
kenjackson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

| For all the talk of freedom, this is disappointing. You're incredibly naive then. Freedom comes from the license. You can fork and modify to your heart's content. This is how open source freedom works. If you think you can do it better, then do it better in your project. Rails is not some sort of public good that belongs to the people. It is a project that people work very hard on and then give away. And for anyone…

Your vote is with your shoes.

Indeed. With this I do agree.

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