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Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

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Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#11

Post by dknight »

SiliconAlley wrote: post #5

"Models are intended to serve only as an abstraction to the database" I'm really tired of hearing this unqualified argument. Fat models is not a creed. It's a practical and natural design choice that we've made because it fits real world workflows best. Do you really want to be copy/pasting your order total calculation logic into 5 separate controller actions? Obviously not. And fat models doesn't mean 800 line sourc…

I am not against fat models. However, the point of separating code into tiers makes it cleaner. The author does approve of concerns. His point is models are becoming too fat over time and people need to follow techniques like concerns and use cases to take out business logic. Essentially something already well known in other platforms is unknown in these communities.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#12

Post by ilaksh »

I think that the most important idea may be in the title.

Yes, every new platform or framework reinvents the wheel, because they are almost all designed to do basically the same things, like CRUD.

I think the only way to avoid reinventing the wheel is to to adopt a common machine-processable abstraction that is at a higher level than the language and domain and use that to build the language and platform. Some type of knowledge representation maybe. Of course I'm not suggesting that is an easy thing to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_re...

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#13

Post by hartror »

andybak wrote: post #6

Here's the comment I left on the article: "Not everyone is solving a scaling problem. Django and Rails solve a problem that you can argue is much more common: writing concise yet readable code without needing reams of boilerplate to handle common cases."

Yes! I work for a commercial mathematics company that does OR consulting. We deliver our tools to our customers via SaaS and the user base is basically nothing in comparison to what I have scaled for in the past. The biggest problem we have is writing maintainable code at speed, performance is only a concern on a UX side and is easy to manage.

Not everyone is on the same growth path.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#14

Post by philwelch »

dknight wrote: post #8
EugeneOZ wrote: post #4

"Models are intended to serve only as an abstraction to the database. They are meant to be 'models of data'." It's about Ruby or common? Because I'm sure Models could have 0 code of working with database and business-logic only. It depends on architecture of project.

Model classes in Rails inherit ActiveRecord::Base. So, you can call a class method like update_all which is equivalent to an update statement on the table. 'Models could have 0 code of working with database and business-logic only' Well the business logic creeping in is one of the issues here. That is why there are attempts to separate out the business logic as in case of the use of /app/use_cases [refer to the link…

There's nothing forcing your model classes to inherit ActiveRecord::Base. It's perfectly acceptable to use other ORMs or even bare Ruby classes as models. If the only thing you want to do is database operations, ORM is a waste of time anyway.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#15

Post by benhoskins »

Seems to be missing the obvious; ruby and python (with some framework sugar) will mostly allow you there quicker than writing java with its framework sugar. I guess the trade off is rather quick to write as opposed to quick to execute. Interestingly, i also hear my colleagues say this about C and Java. Seems to be a recurring question of human understanding vs machine, no?

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#16

Post by camus »

vampirechicken wrote: post #10

> Models are intended to serve only as an abstraction to the database. > They are meant to be 'models of data'. TL;DR: MVC Model is Logical model - business object (invoice) with business logic (delete_line_item), Rails Model is Physical model - persistence layer for RDBMS (add, update, delete, find rows). In all but the most trivial applications, the latter assertion contradicts the former, and the former, is just o…

mew , we all lived the Java/JEE nightmare , and pragmatic programmers got us out of that mess, with no desire to go back to that stuff. I'll take ruby/active record flaws over the "bloated and unecessary entreprise pattern" code anytime.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#17

Post by camus »

wriq wrote: post #3

Possibly, but like most technology there's is a set compromises you're willing to make. Rails and Django seem to be focused on getting something up and running ASAP and then dealing with whatever scaling issues you're going to have when you know exactly what they're going to be. Face it, a good amount of webapps out there won't need to be sharded. 37Signals just threw hardware at basecamp for a while (they still do?)…

I agree, if you dont have a product up and running at first place, how your non existence app scales doesnt matter.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#19

Post by dknight »

camus wrote: post #16
vampirechicken wrote: post #10

> Models are intended to serve only as an abstraction to the database. > They are meant to be 'models of data'. TL;DR: MVC Model is Logical model - business object (invoice) with business logic (delete_line_item), Rails Model is Physical model - persistence layer for RDBMS (add, update, delete, find rows). In all but the most trivial applications, the latter assertion contradicts the former, and the former, is just o…

mew , we all lived the Java/JEE nightmare , and pragmatic programmers got us out of that mess, with no desire to go back to that stuff. I'll take ruby/active record flaws over the "bloated and unecessary entreprise pattern" code anytime.

It might not be wise to go back to bloated JEE. However, it would certainly be unwise to leave the knowledge behind. People working in Rails and Django applications need to learn those important lessons. It can save them from a lot of common pitfalls. I have seen people using a large number of servers for Rails applications while similar load is handled by less half their number of servers using Java.

Re: Are Rails and Django communities re-inventing the wheel?

#20

Post by dknight »

benhoskins wrote: post #15

Seems to be missing the obvious; ruby and python (with some framework sugar) will mostly allow you there quicker than writing java with its framework sugar. I guess the trade off is rather quick to write as opposed to quick to execute. Interestingly, i also hear my colleagues say this about C and Java. Seems to be a recurring question of human understanding vs machine, no?

Wow. I am interested to know how C is reinventing the wheel. Do tell us more about it.
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