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Rails Has Turned into Java

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Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#101

Post by mbell »

currywurst wrote: post #76
adventureloop wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you tried Java EE 6 ? JAX-RS in particular is a splendidly designed api for RESTful services. And then you can make single page apps instead of JSF. This method is even going have ide support in Netbeans 7.3 with wizard-driven Backbone/Angular app generation.

JAX-RS is really nice for building APIs and I actually prefer the way it works to Sinatra, especially if using it with Groovy.

But, this isn't Sinatra vs EE6, its Rails vs EE6, so its not a proper comparison.

To compare with Rails you've got to look at other parts of EE6: JSF + CDI + JPA, which is an awful mess. JSF by itself is enough to kill its usability for many modern applications, the amount of state JSF carries around is ridiculous.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#102

Post by jshen »

jules wrote: post #38
adventureloop wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, perha…

I have yet to see any competition that is better. What do you think is better?

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#104

Post by jshen »

taligent wrote: post #65
aantix wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what other web dev frameworks offer a unified stack (ORM, deployment, dependency management, testing, project structuring)?

Play and Grails are two on the Java side.

It's been a while since I looked at grails, but it was clearly worse when I looked. Some examples, rendering an action as json, XML, or HTML. Using mongo. Etc.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#105

Post by throwawayG9 »

phillmv wrote: post #82
lkrubner wrote: post #13

The pushback against Ruby/Rails has been building for a long time. There's always been jokes about Ruby being slow: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/ But there was a stretch from around 2005 to maybe 2008 where Rails seemed to defy criticism. It grew and grew, despite the criticism. I tried it for a project in 2006 and I became a fan. The easy use of 3rd party code, via gems, was much easier than anything I had…

Uhm. We deployed a new server last night. `cap staging deploy:setup` `cap staging deploy` `cap staging deploy:migrate` You do have to know how to setup Unicorn but…

He's talking about installing the web server, not deploying the application.

Deploying an application can be done with 1-3 commands in any language, since it has little to do with the language itself. All you need is a build or deployment script, which can be written in Bash or whatever.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#106

Post by rsyntax »

taligent wrote: post #11
spellboots wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dependency management in ruby is trivial with bundler.

For small, single apps sure. But if you have large apps with multiple Ruby versions then dealing with rvmrc, bundler and gem incompatibilities is a nightmare. Java's forward compatibility is a lot more robust.

What use case is there for "multiple Ruby versions" within the same app?

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#107

Post by phillmv »

throwawayG9 wrote: post #105
phillmv wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm. We deployed a new server last night. `cap staging deploy:setup` `cap staging deploy` `cap staging deploy:migrate` You do have to know how to setup Unicorn but…

He's talking about installing the web server, not deploying the application. Deploying an application can be done with 1-3 commands in any language, since it has little to do with the language itself. All you need is a build or deployment script, which can be written in Bash or whatever.

I realize, but that too is a constant per platform. It's about the same amount of effort per web server per ecosystem, since in our we case we reverse proxy to the application server.

If we're talking about shared hosting, that's a whole different ball game.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#108

Post by joedev »

Let me try another way. Some Rails apps that are too unwieldy are barely even Rails apps. They just happen to have Rails at some layer of the tech stack, but also have many other non-Rails components such that saying "Rails" has become too complex is disingenuous.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#109

Post by markokocic »

mbell wrote: post #101
currywurst wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Java EE 6 ? JAX-RS in particular is a splendidly designed api for RESTful services. And then you can make single page apps instead of JSF. This method is even going have ide support in Netbeans 7.3 with wizard-driven Backbone/Angular app generation.

JAX-RS is really nice for building APIs and I actually prefer the way it works to Sinatra, especially if using it with Groovy. But, this isn't Sinatra vs EE6, its Rails vs EE6, so its not a proper comparison. To compare with Rails you've got to look at other parts of EE6: JSF + CDI + JPA, which is an awful mess. JSF by itself is enough to kill its usability for many modern applications, the amount of state JSF carrie…

The article said Java, not JEE. In Java land, the choice is much broader than JSF or JPA. The main problem that people bashing Java had was always that it offered too many choices. Ruby had Rails while Java had JSF, Struts, Struts 2, Tapestry, Wicket, Play. Rails had ActiveRecord, while Java had JDBC, Hibernate, MyBatis, OJB, EJB 1/2/3, JPA.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#110

Post by jules »

jshen wrote: post #102
jules wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, perha…

I have yet to see any competition that is better. What do you think is better?

Surely you don't think that Rails is better than everything else in every single respect? There are plenty of frameworks that are simpler (Flask/Sinatra), faster (Play, etc.), support lightweight concurrency better (node.js based, Play too, etc.), have much better IDE support (ASP.NET MVC), support client/server partitioning (Meteor/Opa), and so forth.
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