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Moving on from Rails

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Re: Moving on from Rails

#11

Post by bad_user »

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 graphical interfaces, you have IDEs to help you out with bindings and all that crap.

Rails gives you the possibility of doing progressive enhancements, when you need them. You don't have to build an entire Backbone layer, just for updating a small rectangle on your page, when you can just render a partial in a good old-fashioned way.

    But Rails isn't exactly keeping up
It's just a tool and not all of us need to build GMail. People treat Rails like it's their girlfriend or something.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#12

Post by xd »

"I was coming from PHP. PHP was shit then and is still shit now."

I find it embarrassing that the community would vote up a story with comments like this. There is simply no need for it, and it shows nothing but a lack of articulation and outright immaturity.

If you don't like PHP, fine, but slamming it with one word insults does nothing but insult the tens of thousands of developers out there that use PHP to solve real world problems for a living.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#13

Post by kayoone »

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.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#15

Post by emil0r »

xd wrote: post #12

"I was coming from PHP. PHP was shit then and is still shit now." I find it embarrassing that the community would vote up a story with comments like this. There is simply no need for it, and it shows nothing but a lack of articulation and outright immaturity. If you don't like PHP, fine, but slamming it with one word insults does nothing but insult the tens of thousands of developers out there that use PHP to solve r…

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 out of memory on a machine with 4 gig of ram because the memory is not released until the request is done, etc.

I've done some really nice stuff with this language. But it's still utter shit in so many ways it's painful. PHP is in many ways a lot better, but has some pretty fundamental flaws that still marks it as really bad. He did however, not say one thing about the developers that use PHP, so why would you slam him for that?

Re: Moving on from Rails

#17

Post by Addict »

peteforde wrote: post #10

As an early Rails adopter who rarely gets to code directly on projects anymore (I'm a victim of my own success) I find it really curious when developers feel the need to post expository essays about framework switches. Things move fast and it would be bad for tech evolution to stop, so there's nothing to be loyal to unless you've placed awkward bets on the future of any given tool. DHH said at the first RailsConf tha…

This should be top comment!

I'm still waiting for my crack through...

https://github.com/crack

:D

Re: Moving on from Rails

#18

Post by jwblackwell »

xd wrote: post #12

"I was coming from PHP. PHP was shit then and is still shit now." I find it embarrassing that the community would vote up a story with comments like this. There is simply no need for it, and it shows nothing but a lack of articulation and outright immaturity. If you don't like PHP, fine, but slamming it with one word insults does nothing but insult the tens of thousands of developers out there that use PHP to solve r…

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 some of the largest sites in the world and there are more PHP web devs out there than any other working on millions of PHP sites. There are also some excellent frameworks for PHP that are quick to learn, fast and powerful. Codegintier, Yii or Symphony(2) all spring to mind.

Finally, for most web developers who actually need to earn a living writing code to solve problems, PHP is still the most popular choice for good reason. It's easy to earn, easy to deploy, cheap to host and widely used. There are also more PHP jobs (especially in the U.K.) than any other and it isn't changing anytime soon. For the busy developer trying to make a living these type of posts aren't really helpful at best and at worst quite insulting.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#19

Post by ksetyadi »

"Think back to when Rails first came out. There was no iPhone. There was no Android. People still owned Nokias and actually bought stock in the damn company. Windows XP was still massively popular and we were fighting to get a decent version of IE (but that will never end). There was no such thing as a mobile web. No one was thinking about tablets. How old is the iPad? Not very old".

OK, no iPhone and the iPad is not very old. Wikipedia should change their contents, especially on the dates when the iPhone and iPad were launched.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#20

Post by dasil003 »

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.

No, there are clear use cases either way. On one hand you have documents, on the other you have multi-platform apps. For the former (which still vastly outnumbers the latter BTW), serving HTML from the server is the obvious choice, for the latter, a REST API is the obvious choice. There is a large gray area in between where you basically have documents with a relatively small amount of UI.

I agree that SOA based on REST service (particularly using JSON) are where the most interesting innovation is happening on the web today, but the venerable document model of the web will never go away because it actually fills a surprisingly large use case in a remarkably simple way (hence the success of the web in the first place).

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