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Is Ruby on Rails Maintainable?
kale77in asks: "I've become a big fan of Ruby over the past few months, but I'm not at all sure about Ruby On Rails. Automatic code generation sets of alarm bells in my mind; so that, to RoR's promise of 'Web Development that Doesn't Hurt', I automatically add '...until you have to maintain it'. On the other hand, some writers and coders I respect (like the Pragmatic Programming mob) seem to be fans. I've mainly written generators in Python, to produce PHP/SQL/Java from SQL files, but I've always gone back to well-constructed objects, where extension and overloading offers more precise and maintainable customization than auto-generation allows. So is Rails just a nice RAD tool for disposable, cookie-cutter apps (which have a place, of course)? Is high-level generation just a bad OO substitute? And what has your experience of Rails' maintainability been?"
It's quite obvious that the concept of the automatic code generation done in Ruby On Rails was either not completely grasped or completely missed by the author. The whole purpose of the code being generated was to give you a basic structure to take and change until it was what you needed it to be. This is precisely why it is called 'scaffolding', because it gives you the framework to get started with.
As far as the Ruby On Rails framework itself is concerned, it is extremely capable and flexible for handling a great deal of web application projects. Of course there will be specific functionality that Ruby On Rails will not handle very well — there never are perfect solutions.
I wouldn't consider the reviewers objections completely devoid of import, just misguided. You must always be careful about anything you didn't do yourself, but you must exert the same care and attention to the stuff that you do create yourself! Often we put far too much confidence in our own coding skills.
So, in the end, the concept of Ruby On Rails is simply to alleviate the mundane, rote programming that goes into the basics, particularly the structure and minimalistic database interaction, and make it surprisingly simple.
M.T.
"Support Bacteria - Its the only culture some people have" - Circa 1985
Rails is _not_ a code generation framework. Note the period on that sentence.
Rails may provide the some simple scaffold generation, but that's only there if you _want_ to use it, and it happens to fit the way you'd like a particular part of your app to work. The code produced is concise, easy-to-follow, and thus easy-to-maintain.
For my own applications, I barely ever use scaffolding. It works well for simple admin screens where I just want 'something' that works for now, then will spend some effort on designing it a little better, later.
Rails is as maintainable as you make it. If you're a poor programmer, you're likely to write unmaintainable code, no matter what language or framework you have to help you. Rails helps point you in the right direction, but in the end, it's up to the _developer_ how maintainable his/her code is.
Ruby on Rails script/generate generates very little code. If you choose "File, New class" in Eclipse, you get the about the same amount of code, as you would get if you used rails generation features. The only difference is that ruby on rails also generates a test class for the model.
Scaffolding generates a bit more code, but it is never intended to be actually used. It is ment to be slowly replaced, piece by piece, by your own code. So I don't think the disadvantages of code generation really applies here.
So yes, in my experience a ruby on rails project is maintainable.
Try Ruby (the language) here. Integral to understanding much of Rails.
I released my first production Rails app last month. I like it a lot. I have a background in ASP/SQL Server/PHP. Not having to use Microsoft Windows itself is a huge win. But I like the design of the language and the framework and the built-in separation and a thousand little other things. Check out #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net, great community there too.
Rails provides more then the scaffolding capabilities and simple framework of designing a blog as seen in the video. It provides the structure for fast and organized ruby application development by setting up for the user a foundation of modelling, views and controllers that are easy to use and distinguish. It is not the magic wand to a great web application. The magic wand comes with Ruby programming experience and learning to tie it into Rails application development. You could even go as far as stepping beyond the "narrow view" of what rails is doing and see the bigger picture, understanding that Ruby is supporting all of this webmagic and rails is providing the "rails" as it claims to. One challenge many of the "why is this better than Php?" questioners have difficulty seeing past is the far smaller community rails has, the less clear translation between what php can do and what rails is capable of, and the predefined examples of rails applications in action. Many people leap to using PHP becuase it provides pre-existing code snippets that make the same thing true of many php users, "simple cookie cutter codejobs." Rails offers you a chance at not only using a great framework, but also a great programming language that its built on to make more pragmatic and simpler design tactics to getting your website online and active. Another alternative to rails is Iowa which offers a lighter approach to maintenence, though remains less documented. It can be found here: http://enigo.com/projects/iowa Whatever you choose to do, look deeper into the situation then the surface of what appears to be "cookie cutter" programming and realize that a powerful tool lies beneath all of this: Ruby.
I've been using Rails for about 7 months, and have done two major projects in it. I completely disagree with your assessment. For starters, it's not at all tied to MySQL. PgSQL support is also very good. My understanding is that Oracle support is not so great at the moment. But I expect that will change. My real point here is that Rails is not inherently tied to any specific database; it's just a matter of what ActiveRecord adaptors happen to be out there right now.
As far as requiring the user to write SQL code, yes, you do have to write fragments of SQL code, sometimes. But SQL is a useful way to describe queries -- that's the whole point. Would using some other query language, that got translated to SQL, be any better? I don't see why it would.
Your comment about Rails not abstracting functionality from interface seems off base as well. Rails adopts a standard MVC architecture, which is pretty much the standard method for abstracting functionality from interface. If you're not getting such abstraction in your Rails apps, you probably just need to think about exactly what should go in the models, what should go in the controllers, and what should go in the views, and rearrange things a bit. Like any other MVC environment, Rails can't prevent you from e.g. putting view-specific code in your model. All it can do is provide a structure that allows you to properly separate these things if you take the time to think about your design properly.
Finally, on the charge that Rails only provides proof-of-concept features, I think you've misunderstood one of the major design principles of Rails. Rails is intended to provide a framework to build on, not a bunch of components you can plug together to get a web app without writing any code. As such, many of its components focus on the core functionality that's really useful, to the exclusion of other stuff. That other stuff might sometimes be nice to have, but it frequently locks you into doing things the way the framework does them, instead of the way that's most appropriate to your app. The Rails approach is a very refreshing change, for me anyway, and I hope the project will continue to maintain this focus.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Do you have a beef with compilers and assemblers?
This is a valid question. Quite often when we have a robust low-level language generating high-level language (HLL) code, it's extremely well thought out and tested. However, many are dubious about HLL generating HLL code. I suspect (though I can't prove it) that this is because HLL -> HLL tends to be less widely used and thus is less thoroughly tested and less planned. When done properly -- particularly when covering a restricted and well-defined domain -- it can be extremely powerful. When done improperly, it's a nightmare.
Rails has a large enough user base that most common bugs have been eradicated but from what I've seen, it appears to have a problem that many fourth generation languages suffer from: if your problem fits its domain, it's a piece of cake to solve. When your problem doesn't fit its domain, it can be extremely difficult to solve (anyone who's ever worked with the 4GL Easystrieve Plus can readily testify to this). Most web-based apps, though, are simple enough that folks working with Ruby generally don't seem to have much of a problem with it. However, I've heard horror stories about people trying to use their custom model in lieu of what Rails natively supports -- though I've not had first-hand experience.
Compilers and assemblers tend to be general purpose tools which address a fairly wide problem space. HLL -> HLL tools tend to be special purpose tools and trying to get them to solve problems they aren't optimized for can be trying. In the case of Rails, one thing it excels at (CRUD apps) is a well-known problem space and Rails fits quite nicely.
So I have to say that comparing Rails to compilers or assemblers doesn't quite fit simply due to the differing focus of said tools. However, all of them require that someone trying to work with them understand what they're doing (at least at a high level) and that brings down the maintenance burden quite a bit. Personally, I'm quite impressed with Rails and am happy to see it spread.
The result of the somewhat sloppy documentation is that if I find a function that does something (like by looking at the source) I don't know if it is guaranteed to be there next release. The existing book ("Agile web programming...") is too chatty and not complete and accurate like a reference manual would be.
So I'm somewhat blindly following the examples and when something doesn't work I have to backtrack. Still, all in all, I like it. I need the speed.
And, like a lot of people, I found I had to go back and study Ruby a few times. The existing Ruby docs are great.
But I desperately want a good Rails reference manual.
I18N == Intergalacticization