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Rails Has Turned into Java

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151–160 of 160 posts

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#151

This is bullshit. I'm no fan boy but you can't blame yourself when you've cornered yourself in an complex case of interdependencies. BREAKING NEWS: OVER-ENGINEERED PIECE OF SOFTWARE IS REVEALED TO BE OVER-ENGINEERED. I don't use Refinery, Devise, OmniAuth, Unicorn, Rack Rewrite, Fog, AMQP, or Heroku. I use Passenger with Apache or Nginx, self-host, and write my own core functionality like authentication. Rails is sti…

+1 on keeping things simple and not using a "F"ramework for every concern from the very beginning. >in Java you have to make those architecture choices day 1. That's just not true. Very easy and advantageous to start out with say a simple container-less app with in-memory/flat file persistence and build up as you need. It's no different in Java and much more the norm in other JVM languages like Scala/Clojure.

Thanks.

Perhaps the Java bit isn't true... or isn't true anymore; I haven't done much serious development in Java since I started doing Rails consulting in college. I remember it being XML hell where you needed to plan ahead a lot more in terms of choices, but that said I've probably become a much better developer too.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#152
post #63

This is bullshit. I'm no fan boy but you can't blame yourself when you've cornered yourself in an complex case of interdependencies. BREAKING NEWS: OVER-ENGINEERED PIECE OF SOFTWARE IS REVEALED TO BE OVER-ENGINEERED. I don't use Refinery, Devise, OmniAuth, Unicorn, Rack Rewrite, Fog, AMQP, or Heroku. I use Passenger with Apache or Nginx, self-host, and write my own core functionality like authentication. Rails is sti…

Kindly refrain from swearing, all caps, and 4chan-isms. I prefer to not read that kind of noise, and no doubt others here feel the same.

It was a sensational claim, I'm responding with "sensation". Since we're talking Rails I'll leave this here for you http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/15-potty-mouths

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has got to be one of the worst analogies I've ever seen. One of Rails' core strengths is that it is written in Ruby which makes anything , even batshit-insane dynamic runtime monkeypatching possible. Not that anyone would advocate doing that as a matter of course, but the point is nothing is out of reach in a Ruby app.

Rails has monkeypatching. Access has COM. Inbound developers will not be able to use either of these things because their skills and expectations have been set by that easy 80%.

Monkey-patching really? You're forgetting what else Rails has in our ecosystem: Github.

1.) Fork a project on Github, say the push notification gem https://github.com/jpoz/APNS

2.) Alter behavior in your branch https://github.com/jamesdaniels/APNS

3.) Optional bit, send a pull-request with your changes

4.) Vendor it or require your fork in the Gemfile: gem 'apns', :git => 'git@github.com:jamesdaniels/APNS.git'

Tada!

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails has monkeypatching. Access has COM. Inbound developers will not be able to use either of these things because their skills and expectations have been set by that easy 80%.

Monkey-patching really? You're forgetting what else Rails has in our ecosystem: Github. 1.) Fork a project on Github, say the push notification gem https://github.com/jpoz/APNS 2.) Alter behavior in your branch https://github.com/jamesdaniels/APNS 3.) Optional bit, send a pull-request with your changes 4.) Vendor it or require your fork in the Gemfile: gem 'apns', :git => 'git@github.com:jamesdaniels/APNS.git' Tada!

shortcut:

gem 'apns', :github => 'jamesdaniels/APNS'

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#156

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…

I still think Ruby was made by someone who learned Perl and Lisp, but never managed to really grok Lisp macros.

That's not bad, as Ruby is a very powerful language.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#157
post #150
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No longer better than the competition" doesn't mean "Worse than the competition for ALL use cases". The thing is these frameworks have caught up so much on the expressiveness front that their other advantages can easily start to outweigh the small advantage that Rails has there. But if you are building a low traffic CRUD site (like most sites), then yeah use Rails. If you are building say a chat application, I would…

The dismissive use of "low traffic" bothers me. We made http://disney.com on rails, it runs off a couple of VMs, is really fast, and serves a significant amount of traffic. Can you quantify what you mean by low traffic?

I didn't mean to imply that building a high traffic site in Rails is not a good idea, merely that low traffic is its sweet spot. If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware. This also depends on many other factors. For example if your content is low write high read, i.e. highly cacheable, that can make any difference pretty much disappear.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monkey-patching really? You're forgetting what else Rails has in our ecosystem: Github. 1.) Fork a project on Github, say the push notification gem https://github.com/jpoz/APNS 2.) Alter behavior in your branch https://github.com/jamesdaniels/APNS 3.) Optional bit, send a pull-request with your changes 4.) Vendor it or require your fork in the Gemfile: gem 'apns', :git => 'git@github.com:jamesdaniels/APNS.git' Tada!

shortcut: gem 'apns', :github => 'jamesdaniels/APNS'

Nice.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#159
post #157
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dismissive use of "low traffic" bothers me. We made http://disney.com on rails, it runs off a couple of VMs, is really fast, and serves a significant amount of traffic. Can you quantify what you mean by low traffic?

I didn't mean to imply that building a high traffic site in Rails is not a good idea, merely that low traffic is its sweet spot. If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware. This also depends on many other factors. For example if your content is low write high read, i.e. highly cacheable, that can make any differenc…

Let me try to be more specific. If we consider the space of web development, I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. I feel strongly that a very large portion of the entire web dev space is within rails sweet spot. I think I can back this up, as I did once already with http://disney.com as an example.

"If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware"

I've worked on numerous sites that are in the top 1000 traffic wise according to alexa. I never once felt that it was worth moving them off of rails/ruby. You are probably talking about the top 0.01% of sites or even lower than that.

Re: Rails Has Turned into Java

#160
post #159
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to imply that building a high traffic site in Rails is not a good idea, merely that low traffic is its sweet spot. If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware. This also depends on many other factors. For example if your content is low write high read, i.e. highly cacheable, that can make any differenc…

Let me try to be more specific. If we consider the space of web development, I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. I feel strongly that a very large portion of the entire web dev space is within rails sweet spot. I think I can back this up, as I did once already with http://disney.com as an example. "If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some produc…

> I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space.

No, certainly not! I think Rails is fine for 99% of web sites, and probably the framework that has the highest percentage of sites where it would be my top choice. But Play is also fine for lets say 98% of web sites. Rails even works fine for things like chat applications, but there it would not be my top choice (at least not for the component that serves the messages). That's all I'm saying. Rails is my favorite framework, I just don't think that it is better than everything else in every respect.

You are probably looking at this from a different perspective. Of course it's not worth moving an existing site off Rails if it is already done, or when you'd have to learn a completely new language and framework to do it. But if you are at the start of a project, and you already know e.g. Scala and Play, the situation may be different.

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