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Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

gilesbowkett.blogspot.in

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Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#2

Post by railsjedi »

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be.

I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#3

Post by mnazim »

railsjedi wrote: post #2

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be. I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.

I don't think the author is hinting at ditching rails altogether. IMO, he is just pointing out his disappointments, starting at the start and doing what he thinks is good for him.

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#4

Post by Fluxx »

railsjedi wrote: post #2

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be. I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.

How are things harder with these technologies?

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#5

Post by mtkd »

Rails is very suited to big API projects now - but there is no escaping the fact that all the action is moving clientside.

The Rails learning curve is now very steep for new users and the accusation that it has become all it set out to solve is a fair one.

For me it's a mature/stable framework and ripe for using commercially now, but I can understand the new kids gravitating to something more disruptive.

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#7

Post by mtkd »

railsjedi wrote: post #2

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be. I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.

I'm not sure the community is self critical enough to fix the issues.

The maintainers are highly opinionated and have shown very little concern about the bloat up to now - mitigating it by targeted optimisations not by removal of bloat itself.

The community will just move on to something less bloaty - many Rails developers I know spend more (side project) time with JS now.

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#8

Post by karterk »

As far as Node goes, there is still no "holy grail" framework that can help one build a web app seamlessly across both client and server side. The momentum will definitely shift heavily towards Node if and when that happens. Right now, there is still a lot of manual glue work needed to set-up a client side MVC app using Node + Backbone while also taking care of graceful degradation etc.

Re: Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

#10

Post by railsjedi »

Fluxx wrote: post #4
railsjedi wrote: post #2

I'm not ready to ditch rails yet, but I think the framework (and Ruby itself) needs an intervention. Bundler, Ruby 1.9.2, 1.9.3, and a ton of gems are all making life harder than it used to be. I have faith the community is self critical enough to identify these problems and fix them. Posts like this are needed though to give us all a kick in the ass and make things better.

How are things harder with these technologies?

Having to learn the ins and out of bundler `bundle exec, update, --without :darwin`.. just to use a package handler. I had growl_notify installed, and now we've forced our team to be mac only because we got tired of dealing with linux issues.

Ruby Debug is impossible to get working in 1.9.3. The maintainer of ruby-debug has gone AWOL so we're forced to deal with solutions like this http://blog.wyeworks.com/2011/11/1/ruby-1-9-3-and-ruby-debug that don't work within bundler or a team environment.

1.9.2 + Rails 3.x is attrociously slow (30+sec). With falcon (a very unstable ruby hack) the startup speed goes to 10seconds. But 10sec is still way too slow

Sorry, it sounds bad when I just rant. In the grand of scheme of things, Rails makes me more productive as a web dev than I ever thought possible. It's just easy to pull out the daily frustrations and complain. I've been trying to help fix these issues but they are so dependent on a web of gem authors, and core ruby fixes that it takes an extraordinary amount of time.

I'm almost to the point where I think things need to be fixed top down. Matz needs to take control and try to make stuff not suck as soon as possible. Since he's working for Heroku now, it's in his best interest to push the platform and keep new users engaged.

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