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?"

Comments

It's obvious...

[eruanno]

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.

Get the basic premise right, first

[blakeyez]

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.

It isn't really code generation

[Anonymous Coward]

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 here! In your browser! Painless!

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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.

RoR is maintainable enough -- but...

[oldCoder]

But the programmers API isn't nicely documented in RoR, although there is a web page that claims to do that. For example, to search the RoR API web page you have to use google. Half the time I come up with a blank document. That is, the entry for the function I want is a blank page, and there is no context (no "up" button) so I can't use it as a starting place for more navigation.

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.