What's the Secret Sauce in Ruby on Rails?

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby on Rails seems to be a lightning rod for controversy. At the heart of most of the controversy lies amazing productivity claims. Rails isn't a better hammer; it's a different kind of tool. This article explores the compromises and design decisions that went into making Rails so productive within its niche."

Comments

Relentlessly applying best practices

[Scarblac]

As far as I've seen, there isn't that much actually new in RoR. But it's obvious that someone has had a great idea how a whole bunch of known stuff should fit together, in a way that encourages best practices (like a lot of testing, and code reuse). It has near perfect design.

The language Ruby wasn't new; Active Record wasn't new, nor was the idea, but it fits with Ruby really well. MVC was old, but the tiny bits of boilerplate needed makes it look like magic now and then. Everybody knows testing is essential, but I hadn't seen it integrated into a web framework so well before. The idea of "sensible defaults" can't have been new, but the switch from reams of XML (in Java web programming) to near invisible config is great. The object-oriented Javascript libraries it uses weren't new, nor are template languages, but the way in which they're added together is pretty seamless. Et cetera.

No wonder every web programming language community out there is rushing to put together it's own version of Rails... but the libraries don't always fit together as seamlessly. I think that Hansson's main achievements are recognizing that all the known best practices can be put together really well, and that Ruby and its libraries were a great fit for that.

Re:Relentlessly applying best practices

[I Like Pudding]

AJAX is based on technologies with extremely poor design and implementation, such as browsers, JavaScript, and HTML (poorly designed for this application, perfectly ok for marking up documents)

The only part of that I'll give you is the poor IE implementation of CSS. Browsers' main problem lies in their non-compliance with standards. Solution: test in multiple browsers. WOW, THAT WAS HARD. Next up: JavaScript. Poor design? I was shocked at how powerful the language is when I finally started digging into it after years of avoidance. Poor imlpementation? Not really - just many different implementations. Of course, this can and has already been worked around with libs that abstract the differences away for you. HTML? It still is used as a basic markup language, with all the heavy lifting being pushed into the CSS. Now, CSS is nowhere near perfect, but it does function admirably in the scope of AJAX (when not using IE's broken ass implementation).

Rails takes lessons learned from a decade of server-side Web development, as well as the catastrophe that has become J2EE through over-engineering, and simplifies it to the essential mechanisms.

I half-agree. You imply a minimalism that isn't present. The framework is quite complicated in places and does a lot of tricky things. You see, programming with just the essential mechanisms sucks; you've gone back to CGI.pm. What Rails does is provide a massive lever with which to move your problem. The Actual Work Done Per Line of Code metric exceeds any other framework I have used before. Code efficiency is the watchword, not simplicity.

Built on top of Ruby, which is itself a pretty thin simplification wrapper over C++,

No it isn't. Ruby's implementation is a big, slow VM that doesn't act much like C++ at all. Really, the poor performance is the only thing I dont like about the language.

it combines the simplification of Web site development best practices (MVC, proper tiers, etc.) with the power of an high level development language overlaid directly on top of a low level near-assembly language, with the ability to perforate the abstraction layer (first through modifying Rails source in Ruby, then through C extensions) if needed for performance or other reasons.

That sounds like marketroid speak, and is about 3/4ths BS. Perforate the abstraction layer? Jesus. And just who is running around writing C++ extensions for web apps? Almost nobody. Takes too damn long, and isn't as safe as running through the VM.

Short, brutal version: AJAX built on crap by script kiddies, Rails on bedrock by software engineers.

DHH is something closer to a hacker, not to mention the fact that rails utilizes AJAX and, more generally, javascript all over the place. Does that make AJAX apps built on top Rails rock? Or does all that terrible, awful AJAX stuff diminish Rails? Maybe they, I don't know, utilise the same foundation technologies and standards and complement each other quite nicely? Maybe you are an idiot?