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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?"
Please pick form the list below
Ruby and/or Rails sucks because:
1. It doesn't scale (Twitter)
2. It's slow
3. I read somewhere that Python was a better language
4. I write PHP, I can do everything Ruby/Rails can do better
5. My obnoxious younger coworker uses it
6. It's not lightweight enough
7. The ruby community is full of over-hyping zelous twits
Ruby and/or Rails is awesome because:
1. It scales within reason (Twitter, Lighthouse, Shopify)
2. It's as fast as Python and PHP
3. I read somewhere it was better than Python
4. I used to write PHP, Ruby's been a godsend
5. There are so many motivated and innovative people in the community
6. It's featureful
7. Pythonistas are over-hyping jealous twits
Photos.
I've never heard that Rails would make "programmers obsolete", in fact it seems to be the opposite; if you look at the official Rails site you'll notice that the biggest tag-line is "optimized for developer happiness".
Rails makes developers happier, not unemployed. What's more, anyone can write bad code in any language, so pointing to Twitter is hardly a conclusive argument. There are lots of big Rails sites out there, including Basecamp, the original Rails application.
For a better (and longer) write up on scaling Rails, I refer you to this article.
Over at Ruby Inside we did (and are maintaining) a roundup of ~36 Rails 3.0 beta links/articles (it's up to about 40 now, I think). If you've got Rails 3.0 installed and want to know how to use X or Y or want to learn some of the back story/motivation, the links should come in useful. They're only things that are actually worth reading. Well, mostly.. :-)
Rails makes developers happier, not unemployed.
When you've had a lousy job, the two aren't mutually exclusive. I want assurances that they don't intend to make me happier BY making me unemployed ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's praises are sung by the same group that think MySQL is the ultimate enterprise database.
Everyone knows the real ultimate enterprise database is Access.
I've used Rails on five projects now. To be honest, I think it has made me more and more miserable with each project.
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. Sure, we probably should refactor our app, but we're not in a position to do so at the moment.
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. It gets even worse if you need to optimize that data retrieval. At this point, ActiveRecord becomes a huge pain in the ass, rather than a useful tool.
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. We tried to optimize it, but were spending far too much time fighting with Ruby on Rails and its abstractions. It was cheaper just to buy more hardware.
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.
Thus they have made no allowance for dropping back to raw SQL queries.
Ignoring your inaccurate remarks about the core Rails developers, do you care to expand on the above mentioned claim?
count_by_sql: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M002276
find_by_sql: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M002267
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.
you're taking "ruby is really slow" and trying to spin it into an advantage.
Nope, I'm saying Ruby is optimizing something else -- developer time. That isn't to say it will never be fast, and last I checked, the full Merb stack (and Rails 3.0 is also Merb 2.0) was on par with PHP.
It's also not that it's hard, it's that it's expensive, and a needless expense. Let me put it another way: Do you watch YouTube, ever? (Replace YouTube with Vimeo or any other Flash video website.) Do you ever bother to download a video just to watch it? I mean, you do realize that VLC takes a fraction of the CPU cycles that Flash does, for the same video, right?
But no, I bet you're just like 99% of the population -- it may burn more CPU, it may burn more battery, but you're going to just watch it in the Flash player until you have a good reason not to.
If it was really an issue, if your computer was so old and so slow that the Flash wouldn't play properly... Weigh the amount of time you'd spend in a video downloader against the cost of a low-end PC, and it's a no-brainer.
Ruby on Rails can't be optimized!
Nope, it certainly can, it's just hard, and may (in an absolute worst case) involve replacing parts of it with another language, like C extensions -- not an entirely alien idea to any game developer who's replaced bits of C++ with assembly. (No one would sanely claim that the next blockbuster game should be written in assembly for speed -- you optimize the tight loops that way, but the game logic should be higher level.)
And it's just an observation, I'm not sure if it's cultural or if it's the slowness, but it seems like Ruby people, especially Rails people, focus on horizontal scalability and optimizing their algorithms in the broad sense -- again, O(logn) vs O(n^2). Java vs Ruby is the difference between two servers and four, or a request taking 50 ms vs 100 ms. Your application logic is the difference between four servers and twenty (or not being able to scale at all), or between 100 ms and 2000 ms (or two days, or crash the server because you ran out of RAM).
These are good lessons for any system, but Ruby people seem to be especially conscious of it. Still, I think it illustrates something -- the language is going to be the least of your problems when it comes to optimizing any app, until you're at a much larger scale than 2-4 machines -- think hundreds. Eventually, it may be worth rewriting large chunks of your app, or doing a ground-up rewrite, in a more efficient language -- or it may be worth improving the interpreter of the language you've got (as Facebook has).
But you have to get there first. If you're busy doing Java because you want it to be efficient, and I steal all your marketshare because I write one line of Ruby for every five lines of Java, and I get to market while you've got a prototype with 20% of the functionality... I win. Even if I have to rewrite it all in Java later, I have the money to do that, because I've got the traffic.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What is the point of writing something that tries to look sensible and objective and then round it off with the utterly subjective "Python is for masochists, Ruby is cleaner"?
The only explanation: Your subconscious knows the obvious fact that Python is a beautiful language and thus subverted your entire comment.