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Rails Has Turned into Java

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Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#31

Post by t4nkd »

He's trading most of the simplicity for rich pre-rolled features.

Building your own authorization/authentication and integrating with OAuth is pretty trivial, maybe a few hours if all you need is simply logging people in. Same with a CRUD CMS that'd replace refinery -- you're collecting complexity for a more rich feature set out of the box.

Rack Rewrite isn't really that complex, though Carrierwave+Fog is a complexity layer, if Fog is anything like S3 you could just be posting directly to a REST api(adding complexity in client-side JS -- my favorite kind of complexity.)

Unicorn is slightly more complicated to manage than Passenger, but, apparently you needed to serve fast clients and work on disk a lot? Well, can't be mad about what it buys you.

Honeybadger, Foreman, and New Relic are pretty much DevOps burdens, you'd probably have some form or fashion of this complexity in any web-based app, ever. AMQP is a standard, most people would need a library to interact with it -- this is sort've akin to complaining that you need a library/gem for JSON.

I wasn't even sure you needed heroku as a project dependency -- I though you just needed it locally because it acted like a CLI to their service.

Also, Sinatra is it's own framework, having nothing to do with Rails. And it certainly wouldn't trade out a lot of the dependency complexity you're dealing with.

Really, you traded simplicity for rich features out of the box. Hopefully you took the time to figure out if you actually need those features before integrating them with your app. Also, Refinery's Engine architecture is kind've hair brained.

(P.S. on chrome 24.0.1312.57 and Mountain Lion the dynamic length comment box on this blog is totally fucked.)

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#32

Post by kevinconroy »

tmo9d wrote: post #20
kevinconroy wrote: post #6

No, Rails hasn't turned into Java. Rails has matured into a complex ecosystem. Java has also matured into a complex ecosystem. Frameworks upon frameworks is a recipe for complexity, potential performance problems, bottlenecks, and environmental/context-specific issues regardless of the language that you're using. Will there ever be a language or simple framework that is popular, solves all problems, and doesn't get m…

I added in a note, I think this is the multi-year result of not having a old, grey-haired standards committee around creating APIs. I made fun of Sun and Oracle for doing things like this for years, but after futzing around with Rails frameworks, integration, and edge-cases. I think I would have preferred to have people sitting around a conference call saying things like, "Hey Devise people, your authentication appro…

I, for one, welcome our W3C overlords.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#33

Post by squidsoup »

tmo9d wrote: post #24
squidsoup wrote: post #10

There's not a lot of content in this article frankly. I also suspect the author has either never been exposed to an 'enterprise' J2EE or Spring app, or has simply forgotten what a labyrinthine nightmare those could become. Rails is more complex today, but it is still significantly easier than traditional Java frameworks.

I suspect that your suspicions are wrong because I wrote the article and I spend much of my day writing both Java and Ruby. I just find it easier these days to work with Spring 3. Why? Because the Spring and the Oracle folks reacted to Rails pretty quickly and came up with a lot of solutions that might surprise you. It takes just about the same LoC now to do in Spring what I'm doing in Java. The difference is that th…

An article comparing Spring 3 to Rails, enumerating some of those solutions, would have been more informative.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#34

Post by fleitz »

RyanZAG wrote: post #30

I don't get the Java hate. The stuff in Java is not there just to make your life miserable, it's a result of thousands of people spending millions of hours on complex problems finding that certain methods work well when your source code base becomes too large for simplistic methods. The fact is: Java works, and it works well. Ruby/Rails is getting there, as we see from larger and larger code bases being build on Ruby…

The whole point of rails is not to build massive projects. If you're building massive projects with thousands of classes on rails then you should be all means switch to J2EE.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#35

Post by jgjgcghjhhbfv »

lkrubner wrote: post #2

In the year 2013 it is difficult to remember why Rails was such an explosive breath of fresh air, back when it burst onto the mainstage in 2004/2005. The essay that I think best captured the switch in popularity, from Java (and EJBs and Struts, etc) to Rails, was "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts" by Bruce Eckel, written in December of 2005. He wrote: "One of the basic tenets of the Python language has been tha…

You have to be an idiot if you actually bought the crap about EJBs. The first time I heard about them I said "What is this bulls*t" and swore never to touch it. It is one of those sins that you hope never to repeat again. I continued writing Java server code and never used that. Everyboy I knew thought the same thing. And yet I'm still able to progrAm in Java.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#36

Post by davidw »

Flame-bait title if I've ever seen one.

Let's see an actual comparison with some numbers:

* Lines of code, and number of tasks necessary to get a development environment set up.

* Memory used with one client accessing the system, and with, say, 10 clients accessing it.

* Some performance benchmarks.

I keep my ear to the ground, and have used enough languages in my time that jumping to a new one isn't that big a deal, but I'm pretty happy with Rails and use it by default these days. It's a great way of getting something up and running quickly, while maintaining some order and sense of purpose to the code. It's what I'd use unless there are very clear reasons not to, such as huge scale requirements from the get-go, heavy involvement with web sockets or something like that where thinking a bit before coding is in order.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#37

Post by VeejayRampay »

throwaway420 wrote: post #8

Particularly for small startups and self-funded projects, the most important factor in technology choice is almost always "How long does it take me to translate my idea into a working product?". For me, I haven't yet found anything that matches the ability of Rails to quickly go from just an idea into something that you can start pitching to customers. While Rails and the entire community is dizzyingly large, with ra…

Rails is just the sweet spot for low enough bar of entry, power and expressiveness. It also offers you a proven way to get up on your feet easily.

But well, it's a fashion thing. People need new things, people need to kill the father, people need new chapels. Nevermind that what we have right now does the job perfectly and is lots of fun, we need something NEW.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#38

Post by jules »

adventureloop wrote: post #15
lkrubner wrote: post #2

In the year 2013 it is difficult to remember why Rails was such an explosive breath of fresh air, back when it burst onto the mainstage in 2004/2005. The essay that I think best captured the switch in popularity, from Java (and EJBs and Struts, etc) to Rails, was "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts" by Bruce Eckel, written in December of 2005. He wrote: "One of the basic tenets of the Python language has been tha…

I know it is not the mode to comment to mention your own up vote. Rails might have deteriorated in ease of use, but I cannot imagine it being worse than Java EE was in 2004. Modern Java EE is a world of pain, even simple apps are difficult to build. The entire front end stack is antisocial, difficult to extend and anachronistic. I don't think anyone working with a modern java web stack could read this post about rail…

Rails is now like Java EE because it is no longer better than the competition. It's not that Rails got worse. Perhaps in simplicity it did get worse a bit, but overall Rails now is much better than Rails then. The thing is that the competition got a lot better too. The baseline changed.

I don't think the thing that will be to Rails as Rails was to Java EE exists yet though. The competition has merely caught up, perhaps a little ahead on some fronts and a little behind on others. But there is nothing that is clearly much much better. Things like Meteor and Opa are a step in the right direction, but they don't go far enough (yet).

Does anybody remember this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY

This is not the original Rails video, it's the second one I think, but they're fairly similar (couldn't find the original). Back then when I saw the first Rails video I remember finding it amazing. Now it's just boring.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#39

Post by tmo9d »

spellboots wrote: post #9
taligent wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... Java, have you learned to easy yet?" Try Play, Grails, Vert.X. And you know what it isn't easy. Having to deal with Ruby's dependency nightmares.

Dependency management in ruby is trivial with bundler.

Oh I disagree entirely. After having spend two days debugging someone's versionless Gemfile / bundler problem on my CI server, I want someone to pay for my pain.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#40

Post by tmo9d »

davidw wrote: post #36

Flame-bait title if I've ever seen one. Let's see an actual comparison with some numbers: * Lines of code, and number of tasks necessary to get a development environment set up. * Memory used with one client accessing the system, and with, say, 10 clients accessing it. * Some performance benchmarks. I keep my ear to the ground, and have used enough languages in my time that jumping to a new one isn't that big a deal,…

You want that. Ok? I'm not sure you are going to like the results. But, if you want a follow up, I'll happily supply it.
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