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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?"
So, is version 3 of RoR going to be a big deal, more of the same (good or bad), or just churning technology?
How about, we don't care? Back in the day, Ruby on Rails promised that it will "kill developers" and CEO-s will be coding the sites themselves in Rails, the hype was THIS big. "Programmers obsolete??".
Soon after it turned out "real programmers" can't scale a Rails app to save their job (Twitter).
Your moment of marketing glory is over. Have the decency to go in a corner and die.
(1) It doesn't scale worth a darn.
It actually scales better than just "within reason": yellowpages, scribd, hulu, github, odeo, jango. They don't seem to have any problems. (Twitter is hardly a good example. There was a lot of debate about that and its move to Scala for some [not all] operations. Frankly, it appears that Twitter's approach to programming has been similar to its approach to its business model: "What we did isn't working, and we don't know why... but we don't know what will work, either, so we'll just try something random.)
(2) It's slow.
Yep. What do you expect? It's an interpreted, dynamic language. Nobody has yet succeeded in making a true compiler for those. It's the nature of the beast. You want something faster? Pay out the extra cash to build your site using Java or C++. But both Ruby and Rails continue to improve in speed and together today on average are several TIMES the speed they were a few years ago.
(3) It's not suitable for large projects.
Sure, if you don't know how. It actually does just fine. See the answer to (1) again. While the very top-traffic sites are not built in RoR (they are too old to have been), ebay, yahoo, amazon, and others all have Rails projects in the works.
(4) Python is better.
Maybe, if you're a masochist. Ruby and Python do most of the same things, but Ruby often does it easier and cleaner.
Ruby and Rails aren't perfect. But most of the objections come from people who don't know much about what they're talking about. Not all, certainly, but most. It can be harder to understand than Visual Basic or C++, but any newer technology has some learning curve. If you don't want to bother learning about it, then just be quiet and use whatever else you like.