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Restructured Ruby on Rails 3.0 Hits Beta
Curlsman informs us that the first beta of Ruby on Rails 3.0 has been released (release notes here). Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson blogged that RoR 3.0 "feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand." This release is the first the Merb team has participated in. Merb is a model-view-controller framework written in Ruby, and they joined the RoR development effort over a year ago. Reader Curlsman asks, "So, is version 3 of RoR going to be a big deal, more of the same (good or bad), or just churning technology?"
This is exactly true. Rails was in full-scale OMG hype mode before they even found an application server that worked properly or had a decent XML library. (Many of the fundamental building blocks only appeared because people bought into the hype and found that Rails, as promoted, was simply unusable for anything more than a low-traffic blog.)
And I say this as a developer who really likes Rails, but the toy-developer nature of the community is it's biggest weakness IMO.
If you ever want to attract lots of blog comments, there are 2 subjects to cover:-
Seriously, what put me off Rails was the utter zealotry of some of the people involved in it. Django is full of more sane folks.
You're absolutely right. After seeing widely-publicized incidents like the trademark shenanigans involving DHH, and then the blatant sexism at GoGaRuCo, I refused to become associated with that community.
As a professional, I don't want my name linked to such childish behavior. So I took Ruby and Ruby on Rails off of my resume in May of 2009, and have taken contracts dealing with Django and Python instead.
Unlike the RoR community, the Python community somehow seems to be able to avoid petty arguments and blatantly unprofessional behavior. Then again, the Python community is generally made of more experienced professionals interested in developing high-quality software applications, rather than 18-year-old college students "rebelling" against PHP to develop Web-2.0-buzzword-compliant web sites.
I can't say my experience matches yours. There are two testing modules shipped by default with Python. Django has integrated support for them out-of-the-box. Django itself has plenty of tests. There are plenty of good third-party testing modules and people are pretty vocal about using them.
On the other hand, I do very strongly get the impression that the lax attitude of "I tried it in my browser so it works" is omnipresent in the Rails community, coming right from the top. Witness the uproar over the Google web accelerator. Rails was just plain wrong to use GET for unsafe operations. But "it worked in a browser", so they didn't see anything wrong with it, even though it was out of spec. GWA came along and triggered data-loss bugs in Rails applications that used unsafe behaviour for GET requests, including 37signals' applications. Rails developers, rather than simply saying "whoops, our bad, we'll fix this ASAP", called GWA evil and wrote code to block GWA. Roll forward a year, GWA changes its behaviour and the blocks don't work any more, the same things happen all over again, and the Rails developers call GWA "scary" and "malicious". These are not the actions of people who care about writing the best code possible, these are the actions of people with egos chasing features and attention.
As for the word "professional" in particular, that's a dirty word in the Rails community.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It's a double-edged sword.
I've been involved with rails pretty extensively now for a few years, and i've enjoyed the platform for the most part. A few projects we've launched have grown pretty complex, and we too have had some problems with the code management, but discipline seems to help and a steady peer review.
Ive been working with Java pretty much exclusively since the late 90's, with exception of the last few years which have been focused on Rails projects. I've recently been working with Grails (Grails.org) which is a Java based stack taking the great concepts from RoR platform.
As someone who has never worked with Java, I believe that Grails might not be as easy to pickup and learn, but as someone who has an extensive Java background, it's a serious breath of fresh air. For a large scale project, I MUCH prefer grails code management to rails approach. Obviously with my Java background, i'm partial to Grails.
On the note of deployed code, a few of our rails projects have grown to be pretty large. I've had to implement a LOT of hardware to handle the scaling of usage. We've been able to do a lot of improvements to the code, but compared to the speed and efficiency of Java (Yeah, I never thought i'd say that) I'm a little bit 'burnt' on rails.
Comparing something like Passenger on Apache to Glassfish or Tomcat is like getting out of a 2009 BMW 5 series and jumping into a 1991 Kia.
The first time in YEARS i have had run-away processes take down an entire server, I've migrated all of our servers to Xen servers because i got tired of driving to the datacenter 1-2x a week or making a remote hands call to reboot a server because a zealous process took things down. (Did I mention i bought a load balancer to manage the traffic, i'm doing on 10 machines what i used to do on 3 machines w/my java apps)..
I'm sure that there are folks that know Rails better than I do, we're a do-everything group (4 guys managing a LOT of code and servers), not a large IT shop by any stretch, but on one hand we've hit epic levels of productivity. We've gotten projects out fast, and some of them have done well. We've had other projects we assumed would do great, but ended up failing due to marketing miscalculations. The lesson I'd say i've learned with Rails, is it's better to get a 'good enough' product out the door and then figure out how to tighten it down later than not even make it to the race.
I'm hoping that i can bypass that compromise with Grails, but time will tell. :)
Either way , Rails absolutely has it's place in the Open Source server software stack world. In the end it's just a matter of remembering that if you are doing rails programming, you better be doing it with a Test-Driven development style, as large projects can get out of control.
I've not looked at RoR 3.0, but i'm hoping that they have implemented a Service-style implementation for business logic, rather than encouraging to have it thrown into the Models.
Funny, my experience of the Rails community is that it attracts a lot of crackpots who don't believe in documentation--not even API documentation.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
First, I truly dislike "convention over configuration". The main problem there is that they "convention" they use is far too limited for any sizable application. It may be sufficient for a blog web app, or a bug tracker, or small-scale applications like that. But we now have one web app with over 900 controllers, and "convention" falls apart at this size.
First, yes,
we probably should refactor our app, but we're not in a position to do so at the moment.
you should, and this would be biting you in the ass just as much with other technologies.
But keep in mind, "convention over configuration" is not "convention instead of configuration". The idea is that if you follow the conventions, things work better. If you need to go beyond them, you can still configure things.
The same goes for ActiveRecord. It's great in simple cases, but falls apart rapidly when you're developing larger web apps, especially when you're performing complex data retrieval.
For what it's worth, I prefer Datamapper. I don't have especially bad memories of ActiveRecord, though -- but I probably wasn't doing especially complex queries.
But note, again, it's about convention over configuration. Nothing's stopping you from hand-coding raw SQL, or even going entirely around ActiveRecord in the few cases where you actually need that. The other lesson is, of course, that if your queries are your bottleneck, there are probably other tricks you could be doing, like memcached.
And like it or not, the performance of Ruby is quite poor. We actually had to purchase some additional hardware to handle the extra load after converting an old Java-based web app to Ruby on Rails.... It was cheaper just to buy more hardware.
That's part of the point of Rails, though. It usually is cheaper to buy more hardware than to optimize, Ruby just forces you to face that up front.
Sure, sometimes you can change your algorithm from O(n^2) to O(logn) and get a massive speedup, and it's worth it when you can do that. But an extra 5-10% likely isn't worth it until you're of sufficient size that 5-10% of your hardware is costing more than hiring an extra person to do those optimizations.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That wouldn't be the only time that Rails has been sloppy in choosing the right HTTP method to use. When they implemented REST, they got PUT and POST backwards. Compare with CouchDB, which gets it right: PUT to create and POST to update a record.
A case in point: Rails likes to give your database tables plural names...One of the reasons to prefer singular table names is that it improves Rails's interoperability with the applications that either want to supply data to or consume data created by Rails..
Another reason is that it gets you closer to relational thinking. Plural names come about because some think of tables as collections of records and it follows that said collection should get a plural name. So, your "person" record becomes your "people" table.
However, the table isn't really and formally a collection of rows. What you really have is a set of "person" relations; the plural on the end of relations there is where the plural belongs.
And I don't know how big of a performance hit pluralize yields, but it's doing something that doesn't have to be done: the convention could just as well be singular (and arguably would more properly be singular).
Tweet, tweet.
Funny, I first read about ROR on Slashdot 3 years ago, back around the 1.0 release. The only negative things anyone said back then were quips about DHH's Danish accent. Now it's matured into the finest open source development web development stack available, powering many successful web apps and all I see here are the people who should be supporting it on principles alone talking smack about it.