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Moving on from Rails

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Re: Moving on from Rails

#41

Post by hello_moto »

rickmb wrote: post #8

The author seems to consistently confuse architecture, languages and frameworks. None of his arguments have anything to do with Rails, Ruby, PHP or whatever else he mentions, except partly Javascript. This seems to be a recurring pattern with developers who have "discovered" design and architecture through frameworks and can not seem to separate that from the tools used.

I think this is true but in my experience, they are what most people call "Application Developers".

Linus is still writing code in C even for a simple GUI app that wxPython can do for him quickly.

Josh Bloch is still writing code in Java since 97/98?.

Crockford/Resig will probably never write software in a language other than JavaScript.

Your Application Developer will quickly move to the latest trend spreading HackerNews.

So if you want to be famous writing frameworks or tools, make sure you hit frontpage of HN.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#42

Post by hello_moto »

bad_user wrote: post #11
bphogan wrote: post #4

This is less about moving on from Rails and more about moving on from building static pages from a database. Lots of web folks have been predicting this. I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views and do something pretty awesome. And then it becomes a question as to what Rails…

I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. You'll keep saying that for another two or three years at least. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views Backbone-style development sucked when people did it with Microsoft's MFC, it sucked when people did it with Java's Swing and it sucks right now. At least for native gra…

It's about time to keep up with Zed Shaw tradition: the prediction that Alpha nerds will leave what was hot a few years ago with a lot of crappy code for the next generation.

Here's a prediction: 6 years from now, there will be more crappy heavy JavaScript based web-application out there and the biggest money making is to maintain and fix these apps.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#43

Post by hello_moto »

I did a single-page app before with GWT. I guess the GWT crowds beat y'all by miles since 2007.

The problem with this kind of web-app is that it's so much harder, so much more difficult, so much effort is required. And you need to be very very discipline and build automation testing from ground up (and I know many developers are just lazy to write automation testing, don't give me the start-up/iterate faster excuse, lazy is lazy).

At least with GWT, there are patterns and good practices to support unit-testing and modularizing your app properly.

In JavaScript? the fight just goes uphill straight away. In 2011, we still don't have automation test framework that is headless (console based) without requiring investment to infrastructure. And this is largely because the mentality of JS developers is to test in real-browser. Which is fine. Except the extra effort required to setup automation-test will cause a lot of people to find more excuse not to write automation test.

I get that developers are optimist people. But time through time, developers get burned so bad. Most people don't even know how to write JavaScript code properly but they're so ambitious. These people bite more than what they can chew.

So... good luck doing that while some of us will stick with Rails/Django/PHP/JEE6. Get ready, you're in for a lot of pain.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#44

Post by bphogan »

hello_moto wrote: post #42
bad_user wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. You'll keep saying that for another two or three years at least. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views Backbone-style development sucked when people did it with Microsoft's MFC, it sucked when people did it with Java's Swing and it sucks right now. At least for native gra…

It's about time to keep up with Zed Shaw tradition: the prediction that Alpha nerds will leave what was hot a few years ago with a lot of crappy code for the next generation. Here's a prediction: 6 years from now, there will be more crappy heavy JavaScript based web-application out there and the biggest money making is to maintain and fix these apps.

That's not far off. I've made good money fixing Rails apps that have no tests :)

Re: Moving on from Rails

#45

Post by xiaoma »

xd wrote: post #25
emil0r wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst language I've ever written commercial web sites in is called OOiS-Script. You can't release memory, there is no such thing as an array, functions doesn't exist, there is no scope, when you handle XML you have to strip all namespaces because it uses ':' as the indicator for trasversal, there is no XPath so you have to loop through the levels and with a mere 3000 files processed one after another you can run…

"but has some pretty fundamental flaws that still marks it as really bad." What flaws are these? "He did however, not say one thing about the developers that use PHP, so why would you slam him for that?" I've spent well over a decade of my life developing solutions for real world problems with this "shit" language. I founded a business on this "shit" language 4 years ago and we are going from strength to strength. So…

>What flaws are these?

Have you ever seen this piece? http://tnx.nl/php.html

Some of the issues mentioned have been dealt with in PHP5 but a lot of the problems will probably be there permanently, such as inconsistent function names, arguments and return values mentioned at the top of the piece.

That isn't an insult to people using PHP. Much like I sometimes say that soda sucks without implying that soda drinkers suck, he's saying that PHP sucks without implying that PHP users suck.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#46

Post by xd »

xiaoma wrote: post #45
xd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but has some pretty fundamental flaws that still marks it as really bad." What flaws are these? "He did however, not say one thing about the developers that use PHP, so why would you slam him for that?" I've spent well over a decade of my life developing solutions for real world problems with this "shit" language. I founded a business on this "shit" language 4 years ago and we are going from strength to strength. So…

> What flaws are these? Have you ever seen this piece? http://tnx.nl/php.html Some of the issues mentioned have been dealt with in PHP5 but a lot of the problems will probably be there permanently, such as inconsistent function names, arguments and return values mentioned at the top of the piece. That isn't an insult to people using PHP. Much like I sometimes say that soda sucks without implying that soda drinkers su…

When you insult something that is part of ones persona, you are insulting that person. Soda is an awful thing to compare to something that someone has spent a decade of their life expressing themselves with.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#47

Post by dextorious »

kayoone wrote: post #13
rickmb wrote: post #8

The author seems to consistently confuse architecture, languages and frameworks. None of his arguments have anything to do with Rails, Ruby, PHP or whatever else he mentions, except partly Javascript. This seems to be a recurring pattern with developers who have "discovered" design and architecture through frameworks and can not seem to separate that from the tools used.

thought the same, like he says PHP was shit and still is (which is partly true) but then delivers CRUD Tasks, ORMs etc as the reason for Rails which also are very popular in all other frameworks for other languages nowadays.

"""but then delivers CRUD Tasks, ORMs etc as the reason for Rails which also are very popular in all other frameworks for other languages nowadays."""

The might be popular for "other languages nowadays", but he delivers those as a reason of Rails success BACK IN THE DAY.

And indeed it was. Not many PHP ORMS and scaffolding frameworks existed or where successful back then.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#48

Post by dextorious »

hello_moto wrote: post #40
jwblackwell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defence of PHP: Firstly, every time I see it getting slammed its nearly ALWAYS PHP in comparison to a framework whether it's rails, django, web2py or whatever. As soon as I see this I can't help but feel the author is just jumping on the "PHP isn't cool bandwagon". PHP isn't a framework, so don't compare it to other frameworks. Secondly, it is possible to write good code using PHP - and many people do. It powers s…

I'm not sure you should put "write good code using PHP" in the same paragraph with "some of the largest site in the world". Because they're the exact opposite. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them. PS: for the downvoters, why the hate? it's the fact though. I'm not saying you cannot write good code in PHP. What I'm trying to say is that "big sites ou…

"""Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them."""

You've seen Facebook's codebase? I doubt it.

And when you show me a blogging platform more successful than Wordpress, then we will talk.

Who exactly despises FB, Wikipedia or Wordpress? Not the users.

And while I can't talk about Wikipedia and FB (haven't seen the source), neither do Wordpress developers (including the tens of thousands of plugin authors) despise Wordpress's codebase.

Also, it's not about how well you like it, it's about what you can do with it, and especially what you users can do with it.

Yeah, Wordpress could have been written in, say, elegant Haskell. And then it would have gotten nowhere, because very few people could have got it working on their webserver or on a shared server platform. And it would have lacked tons of extensions that PHP gives it, from Imagemagick to LDAP to DB2 client libraries --or it would have to use some less battle tested, less popular and less mature Haskell equivalents.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#49

Post by hello_moto »

dextorious wrote: post #48
hello_moto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you should put "write good code using PHP" in the same paragraph with "some of the largest site in the world". Because they're the exact opposite. Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them. PS: for the downvoters, why the hate? it's the fact though. I'm not saying you cannot write good code in PHP. What I'm trying to say is that "big sites ou…

"""Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, all of them don't have a good PHP codebase. In fact, people despise them.""" You've seen Facebook's codebase? I doubt it. And when you show me a blogging platform more successful than Wordpress, then we will talk. Who exactly despises FB, Wikipedia or Wordpress? Not the users. And while I can't talk about Wikipedia and FB (haven't seen the source), neither do Wordpress developers (i…

Facebook, Aditya Agarwal, presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Facebook-Software-Stack

Judge for yourself (you probably have to interpret what he said there since obviously he doesn't say up-front "it sucks" but the words he chose describe the situation).

Maybe despise is a strong word.

But what's your point? successful project so they must have good codebase or something?

My original post was that "those projects don't necessarily have a good code base" (thus you may want to choose other examples to show a better written PHP code base).

You're off by miles.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#50

Post by jshen »

bphogan wrote: post #35
jshen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got finished porting an admin panel from rails views to backbone.js and doing anything in backbone.js is a lot more work. Not only that, you still end up using rails views because you probably want to send pre rendered html to the client to minimize their wait time.

Just curious, but did you use a JS templating language? Cos we've been sending json back and pushing it to mustache templates which seem to render pretty quick.

I used underscore templates. Rendering large complex pages is slow. Doing it client side on an iPad is not good.
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