Thinking about Rails? Think Again

wolfeon writes "In 2005, Derek Sivers of CD Baby wanted to scrap his site and perform a rewrite in Rails. He hired Jeremy Kemper, also known as bitsweat on Freenode, to help on the project. Two years later, through blood and sweat, the project was then canceled because of limitations of Rails. Rails just wasn't meant to do everything since it is very much "canned" project. Mr. Sivers has written an entry in the O'Reilly blog: 7 reasons I switched back to PHP."

Comments

To me that's poor planning

[RaigetheFury]

Every technology out there has it's benefits. It's the job of the person planning the project to explore all of these technologies before they choose one. If you read his article, he makes no comments as to why he chose Ruby on Rails. Was he following the hype?

I've been involved in the decision making process to choose a technology for writing a site many times. Working for a University common questions we use in comparison to the technology is

1) Development time
2) Ability to integrate with LDAP or other existing technologies
3) Support (server level)
4) Documenation (For development)
5) Budget
6) Number of developers on the project

Depending on those variables it usually winds up being either PHP or Cold Fusion. Ruby on Rails has never once been a consideration. Not because it isn't a good solution, but it's never once been the best for our needs.

article: -1, troll

[Verte]

New article summary:

1. I still have to program it
2. We already knew PHP
3. Rails has features I didn't use
4. Rails has too many features
5. I didn't really want to change my thought process
6. I like my way of doing things
7. How I justified trying something new.

I'm not saying that these aren't valid- save 1 and 3, maybe. But they aren't new, and aren't interesting.

He was incompetent...!

[bogaboga]

Two years later, through blood and sweat, the project was then canceled because of limitations of Rails.

While I do not doubt the hired programmers coding skills, I am afraid he was incompetent at planning.

It's like choosing ISAM as the DB engine in MySQL instead if InnoDB then expecting to implement [referential] integrity using your own code.

The fact that it took two years to realize imminent failure disturbs my mind. The worst thing is that this coder might have been an Open Source enthusiast that I'd expect to know better.

I am afraid no home work was done or whatever home work was done, it not good enough. The results speak for themselves.

Re:Why rewrite existing systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of a similar incident I saw on Reddit a few months ago:

Sometimes it's best to leave old software systems alone.
http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/88

Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I'll describe the situation he encountered.

In the mid-1990s, the company in question built their IT operations around systems from Sun. They wrote much of their in-house code using C++, and used Oracle for their database needs. On the front-end, they used PCs running a mix of Windows NT 3.51, FreeBSD 2.x, and even OS/2, depending on the department. While that is not a unique setup by any means, what is somewhat unique is that they essentially continued to use those same systems up until 2006.

One of the main reasons why they didn't switch is because their software systems worked just fine, even if the UIs were somewhat archaic. Their software was mature and well-understood by the company's employees. They even got extremely lucky in the first place, as the developers who initially designed and implemented their software systems did so in a way that allowed for the systems to easily scale as the need arose over time.

The hardware proved to be the main instigator of change. After a decade, many of the front-end PCs they were using started to exhibit a variety of physical problems. Some had been replaced earlier, but eventually it was decided to replace them all with newer systems. However, to the best of my friend's knowledge, the back-end Sun systems were working just fine.

However, at the same time they decided to also replace the back-end systems. A variety of consultants were apparently called in to appraise the situation. For whatever reason, it was eventually decided that the new back-end systems would be built around Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005. The new back-end software was to be built upon .NET, while Web-based client-side apps would be developed and used. My friend wasn't sure exactly when this effort started, but he believed it was in early 2006.

By the end of 2006, the consultants and developers deemed the new system ready to go. Over the course of the December 2006 holidays, the new systems were rolled out. It turned out to be a pretty major disaster. The first problem they ran into was a complete lack of performance. As they moved into the first weeks of 2007, their back-end systems just wouldn't scale. As an emergency fix, they ended up throwing more hardware at the problem, which did ease the burden on the existing servers somewhat. But it was in no means a permanent solution.

The front-end software systems proved to be an even bigger disaster. Many of the AJAX-based applications used Internet Explorer-specific functionality. But the IT managers of some of the front-end networks would not allow IE to be used, for security reasons. They only allowed for Firefox to be used. So the Web-based front-end software needed significant modifications right away, as well.

What was perhaps the worst failure involved the in-house users and their productivity. Large portions of the old system were built around a curses-based UI. Although it apparently wasn't very pretty, it did allow for a great deal of user productivity. One of the main complaints about the new Web-based software was that the keyboard support was quite poor, requiring the user to select input fields using the mouse, and at times even having to scroll the page to input or manipulate certain data. With the earlier system, the nagivation could rapidly be performed using just the keyboard. Some of the more experienced users were apparently so efficient with the older system that their productivity was reduced to 25% of what it was before the switch.

My friend and his colleagues were called in to try to

Re:thinking about something new? think again

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Try Ruby, code up a project in it after you actually understand the language, and you'll see the draw. For instance, just an hour ago I was writing a quick script to recurse through directories and apply ReplayGain. I had a loop like this:

Dir.foreach(target) do |entry|
  if File.directory?(entry)
    recurse(target + '/' + entry)
  else
    dostuff(target)
  end
end

Later on, just on a whim, I decided I wanted it to sort the dir listing so I could judge how far it was through the process. I only had to change the first line:

Dir.entries(target).sort().each() do |entry|

A teensy tiny sript to be fair, but that's just an example that I was able to pull out of the last couple hours, I've done much larger things but it'd be hard to think of a good example. There's nine different ways to do everything, and they all work exactly like you'd expect. There's a million things that allow beautiful constructs, like lambda functions and yield statements, implict reference but easy to do deep copies, it goes on and on. The langugage is just an absolute joy to work with, and I'm saying this as a hard-line strict ANSI C++ programmer--so much so that I still find it hard to make myself use long long.

The problem is, it's so easy that it attracts people who hardly understand programming. It also makes you want to try out weird new ideas. I've never looked very hard into it, but from everything I've heard about Rails and its almost code-generation level programming I get the impression that it's a great idea that got over-engineered to Frankenstein proportions, like the first home project of any size a fledgling programmer makes. Not saying these guys are that ... just that's what it reminds me of.

One good measure I try to follow is, if you have to basically learn an entire new language to use your product, be it a framework or a word processor, unless you've purposefully designed it as a language, with all the deep thought that goes into that, you're probably doing something wrong. Really, the yardstick I try to go by is, you should only have to learn one thing to progress further, never two things at once, and it should always be apparent what directions are available. I looked over the Rails documentation and example source, and it doesn't meet that criteria.

Ruby Isn't Rails. Check out the language, it's a thing of beauty, and it allows you to do things really quickly, really easily, and most importantly, the Right Way without a lot of extra effort (an area C++ fails miserably at, unfortunately). No, it's not the fastest language by a long shot, but haven't we always said that premature optimization is the root of all evil? They can (and in all likelihood will) fix that later. Plus, given how easy it is to add inline C, which can easily interact in both directions, make calls, construct objects, etc... well, when I discovered that it was like I was banging a smoking hot woman, who to be fair is a little slow, and I found the keys to a Porche at the bottom of her vagina.