Mongrel also supplanted lighttpd pretty quickly.. like flipping a switch. Rails is built so you can drop in your web server of choice fairly easily. It's simple enough to migrate to another, and his leaving doesn't exactly make all the installed mongrel instances break.
Most complaints about Rails have to do with people, and less with the code itself. Rails isn't perfect, but it isn't trash, either. It's the assholes who talk about it like it's perfect that are the problem. Rails is doing well for a young framework.
Why is a company capable of such awesome technical inginuity (Amazon Web Services) getting hung up on something so utterly ridiculous? This just smacks of leadership that is a cut below the calibre of its employees.
Not to mention the more obvious fact that people will wait for a Wii, and get one when they can regardless. This isn't a PS3 vs Xbox 360 toss-up. Nintendo's got something you can't get anywhere else.
The thing to bear in mind here is that the web browser is not part of the operating system when you take into account what an operating system actually is. The web browser is an application that runs on the operating system; it is not a part of the OS itself. Microsoft may have built IE in this way, but the implementation doesn't necessarily define where the lines are drawn. The availability of a myriad of different web browsers, each of which is fully capable of running on a variety of OSs without being integrated, proves this. Microsoft has gotten away with IE bundling primarily because they claimed it isn't feasible to remove IE from the OS. That is a load of BS, but they fooled the courts once.
It's difficult to spend money advertising a product when that product is free, especially when you're up against an entrenched monopoly. ZoneAlarm isn't free. Opera's own press release claims they would be satisfied if IE was unbundled (notice the "and/or" in the quote in the summary above). The far more important point is web standards. I truly believe Opera is more concerned about standards than marketshare.
Red herring alert. IE is the only major browser left that has "poor" standards compliance. It really is. Anything that runs either Gecko (Firefox, Camino, et. al.) or WebKit (Safari, Mobile Safari, OmniWeb, others..) is going to nail most valid XHTML+CSS without a hiccup. My experience is that Opera tends to have a couple more issues than either of those rendering engines, but nothing as ridiculous as IE (both versions 6 and 7). Historical context doesn't help IE here. All non-IE web browsers have done a great job for years.
I'd normally agree with you, but in this case the obviously inferior and downright broken product is winning, and it's got nothing to do with price. Two words: market failure.
Except that when using an alternative OS, you've already made the decision to use something that isn't the "default." For most people the question of which OS to use never comes into the picture (unless of course the question is XP vs Vista, in which case your choice of browser isn't really a choice at all). The overwhelming majority of people simply buy a computer from a well-known name like HP, Dell, etc., and they get Windows with it. When the question of which OS to use isn't a question at all, it could be fair to say that an illegal-gained monopoly is keeping alternative browser vendors out of the market. It's natural for the average buyer to simply click "the internet icon" and assume that that is how the internet is accessed.
To be fair, most of these people probably wouldn't understand the usefulness or benefit of using something other than IE, but you could argue (successfully, IMO) that they know no better because Microsoft has made it that way. With the browser wars heating back up, it might behoove us to revisit the topic. It wouldn't be difficult for any OS vendor to have a simple 1-window dialog upon first post-installation bootup that asks "Which web browser would you like to use?" with a tidy list of the top 5 browsers by marketshare. The Randian in me hates the idea of forcing a company to advertise competing products, but again, courts have already ruled that Microsoft broke the rules in the first place.
You can't have it all. Simple as that. You simply cannot expect people to always design and develop for the lowest common denominator. We'd have no innovation if we took every single accessibility issue into account from the get-go. AJAX is young, even today. We're still figuring out the best ways to apply it, where it's appropriate to apply it, etc. Browser vendors are going to have to adapt to it; not the other way around. The entire reason it's difficult right now is because what we're effectively doing is using tools that were always there to do things they hadn't done before.
So far as screen real estate goes you make a point, but resolution independence is on its way, and I can't see myself building sites in 640x480 simply because someone might want to up the font size five times. A well-designed site can cope with this regardless.
So far as scripts go, I think you're a little too paranoid. Yes, they can be misused, and yes, it's possible that in leaving scripts on that you'll expose yourself to a security risk, but shutting them off entirely is a knee-jerk reaction at best. The overwhelming majority of these problems can be avoided by simply using a little common sense and staying away from questionable sites in the first place. I've never turned off scripts in my browser, and I've never run a virus scanner. Across three different platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux), I've yet to get hit by a single virus, piece of malware, etc. It's all about common sense.
I'd rather have a spec that clearly defines how content is embedded, rather than what content to embed. Specifying a particular format reduces freedom. There's nothing to say you can't use Ogg. The only benefit to having Ogg in the spec itself would be to get the format more well-known, but that should happen on its merits, not because a standards body decreed it so. What is unfortunate in this instance is just how much sway a single company or pair of companies can have over a spec as a whole, and how quickly they can make changes happen. It just smacks of impropriety. I don't think anyone's going to argue that H.264 is a bad codec, but isn't the point of a standard to ensure interoperability? Why do these companies have so much clout?
Encrypt everything. Someone more knowledgeable in the area can shed more light on this, but will any of this filtering software have any discernable effect if we encrypt all communications?
Rails was borne of a production application: Basecamp. It didn't come into existence because they "hated EVERYONE!" The application had already been built in Ruby, and DHH saw that there was a lot of the system that could be reused. He packaged it up, and released it under the name "Ruby on Rails."
Rails has gotten hyped, no question, but the level of rhetoric leveled against it has gotten to the point where people are unwilling to acknowledge that it is a capable framework. Great marketing only gets you so far, and like so many other wildly popular "products," at the end of the day people tend to use what works for them. There aren't many examples - open-source or closed - of things that get lots of acclaim without deserving any of it. Your dislike of Rails has nothing to do with Rails itself, but rather how you perceive it to be portrayed. We all remember the Java hype. We all remember the.NET hype. Hype surrounds everything new, and Rails is new. The hype will die down, and when it does, what you'll find is that it will settle into its own area of web application development, right alongside all of the other great frameworks, languages, etc. Java didn't really revolutionize the world the way we were told it would. It did, however, become a very capable branch of application development, and thousands of developers make an excellent living doing it.
Sure, we sometimes joke about Ruby on Rails being "better" than the alternatives, but for professional Rails developers it's more about having a good time than anything else. It might even happen to have something to do with so many of us liking Macs - we Mac-users are a rather devoted bunch. Sometimes it's easy to read too much into it, and I think that's what has happened here. I attended RailsConf this year, and for the most part the people I met were enthusiastic developers who were making web applications and having a pretty good time doing it. If the work you're doing with not-Rails is working, there is little reason to believe that the existence of Rails or even the current enthusiasm for it is going to translate into competitive pressure you won't be able to handle. If you're good at what you do, and already have development tools and practices that work for you, none of that is going to change, and that doesn't mean you don't stand to benefit from it. Just take a look at CakePHP.
Any negative impact Rails has will be felt by the people on the fringe. Those who don't really know how to develop applications, and are ill-suited to the tasks with which they are currently tasked. Every time something comes along that attempts to elevate the discussion, there will be those unable to keep up.
That does not mean that you stop innovating. That's simply the nature of competition. If you have confidence in your work, you have nothing to fear, and more importantly, no reason to hate.
I can't take you seriously when you claim that all Rails developers are "zealots." You wear your bias on your sleeve.
As a Rails developer myself, I know for a fact I'm not out there making "mythical, false claims." When I develop solutions for clients, I sell them just that: solutions. I don't sell them Ruby on Rails solutions. I just sell them solutions. My experience is unless a client has a specific desire to use a particular framework or language (.NET and J2EE are popular requests), they don't really care. So long as the finished product does what they ask, the actual technology behind it doesn't seem to matter. I certainly see that for the not-Rails coder that Rails is your competition, but if the only reason you don't like it is because it gives someone else an opportunity, perhaps what you should be doing is picking up a book and learning what it's actually about, instead of pointing fingers.
My experience with Rails developers is that they're excited about the framework because they feel it delivers on a lot of its promise. That's certainly how I feel, although anyone who's used it for any kind of professional work will know that it isn't the be-all-end-all and that you still have to do a lot of work to get a product you're happy with. That's true for most good frameworks. They make the job easier; they don't do it for you.
Rails almost certainly isn't the first challenge of its kind you'll have faced, and it isn't going to be the last. You can't expect to code PHP and have PHP be the be-all-end-all for the rest of your career. It just doesn't work that way. New things come out, and some people adopt those things. Fighting your competition with name-calling isn't going to get you anywhere. At the end of the day, Rails hasn't seen the kind of adoption it has solely because of good marketing. At the end of the day, product actually matters, and Rails has chops.
I told him to grow up not because he disagrees with me, but rather because he assumed that anyone with my opinions must be in high school and living with his or her parents. A very childish retort, indeed, and the specific reason I said he needed to "grow up."
Seriously.. why does Ruby on Rails get so many people so fired up? If you don't like it, don't use it. If you do like it, feel free. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but for many people Rails comes pretty close. If you're not one of those people, there are plenty of other frameworks and languages.
Why do people in any kind of IT have such huge egos? It's counterproductive and at the end of the day, if you're making the client happy, and that makes your boss happy, you've done your job.
That's an awesome idea. I cannot imagine how much better the life of the web developer would be if IE actually spat out useful error messages, or had something ala Firebug.
Someone once said to aim high so failure still puts you further ahead. If you honestly think that I honestly think this is feasible overnight, you're dreaming. There's nothing wrong with talking about how things would be ideally, so we can work backward from there to find reasonable solutions. That being said, I stand by the original (-1 Flamebait) comment. Sometimes you have to be willing to take risks if you believe in something. I believe in standards.
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Mongrel also supplanted lighttpd pretty quickly.. like flipping a switch. Rails is built so you can drop in your web server of choice fairly easily. It's simple enough to migrate to another, and his leaving doesn't exactly make all the installed mongrel instances break.
92.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot. (Yes, I had to.)
Most complaints about Rails have to do with people, and less with the code itself. Rails isn't perfect, but it isn't trash, either. It's the assholes who talk about it like it's perfect that are the problem. Rails is doing well for a young framework.
Why is a company capable of such awesome technical inginuity (Amazon Web Services) getting hung up on something so utterly ridiculous? This just smacks of leadership that is a cut below the calibre of its employees.
Not to mention the more obvious fact that people will wait for a Wii, and get one when they can regardless. This isn't a PS3 vs Xbox 360 toss-up. Nintendo's got something you can't get anywhere else.
Betamax was more expensive. The market chose price. When your two options are both free, the only basis for judgment is merit.
Opera is pulling for the removal of IE. Not the rendering engine.
You're absolutely right.
The thing to bear in mind here is that the web browser is not part of the operating system when you take into account what an operating system actually is. The web browser is an application that runs on the operating system; it is not a part of the OS itself. Microsoft may have built IE in this way, but the implementation doesn't necessarily define where the lines are drawn. The availability of a myriad of different web browsers, each of which is fully capable of running on a variety of OSs without being integrated, proves this. Microsoft has gotten away with IE bundling primarily because they claimed it isn't feasible to remove IE from the OS. That is a load of BS, but they fooled the courts once.
It's difficult to spend money advertising a product when that product is free, especially when you're up against an entrenched monopoly. ZoneAlarm isn't free. Opera's own press release claims they would be satisfied if IE was unbundled (notice the "and/or" in the quote in the summary above). The far more important point is web standards. I truly believe Opera is more concerned about standards than marketshare.
Red herring alert. IE is the only major browser left that has "poor" standards compliance. It really is. Anything that runs either Gecko (Firefox, Camino, et. al.) or WebKit (Safari, Mobile Safari, OmniWeb, others..) is going to nail most valid XHTML+CSS without a hiccup. My experience is that Opera tends to have a couple more issues than either of those rendering engines, but nothing as ridiculous as IE (both versions 6 and 7). Historical context doesn't help IE here. All non-IE web browsers have done a great job for years.
I'd normally agree with you, but in this case the obviously inferior and downright broken product is winning, and it's got nothing to do with price. Two words: market failure.
Except that when using an alternative OS, you've already made the decision to use something that isn't the "default." For most people the question of which OS to use never comes into the picture (unless of course the question is XP vs Vista, in which case your choice of browser isn't really a choice at all). The overwhelming majority of people simply buy a computer from a well-known name like HP, Dell, etc., and they get Windows with it. When the question of which OS to use isn't a question at all, it could be fair to say that an illegal-gained monopoly is keeping alternative browser vendors out of the market. It's natural for the average buyer to simply click "the internet icon" and assume that that is how the internet is accessed.
To be fair, most of these people probably wouldn't understand the usefulness or benefit of using something other than IE, but you could argue (successfully, IMO) that they know no better because Microsoft has made it that way. With the browser wars heating back up, it might behoove us to revisit the topic. It wouldn't be difficult for any OS vendor to have a simple 1-window dialog upon first post-installation bootup that asks "Which web browser would you like to use?" with a tidy list of the top 5 browsers by marketshare. The Randian in me hates the idea of forcing a company to advertise competing products, but again, courts have already ruled that Microsoft broke the rules in the first place.
You can't have it all. Simple as that. You simply cannot expect people to always design and develop for the lowest common denominator. We'd have no innovation if we took every single accessibility issue into account from the get-go. AJAX is young, even today. We're still figuring out the best ways to apply it, where it's appropriate to apply it, etc. Browser vendors are going to have to adapt to it; not the other way around. The entire reason it's difficult right now is because what we're effectively doing is using tools that were always there to do things they hadn't done before.
So far as screen real estate goes you make a point, but resolution independence is on its way, and I can't see myself building sites in 640x480 simply because someone might want to up the font size five times. A well-designed site can cope with this regardless.
So far as scripts go, I think you're a little too paranoid. Yes, they can be misused, and yes, it's possible that in leaving scripts on that you'll expose yourself to a security risk, but shutting them off entirely is a knee-jerk reaction at best. The overwhelming majority of these problems can be avoided by simply using a little common sense and staying away from questionable sites in the first place. I've never turned off scripts in my browser, and I've never run a virus scanner. Across three different platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux), I've yet to get hit by a single virus, piece of malware, etc. It's all about common sense.
To clarify, I meant to say that I don't think anyone would argue that H.264 is bad, because it isn't.
I'd rather have a spec that clearly defines how content is embedded, rather than what content to embed. Specifying a particular format reduces freedom. There's nothing to say you can't use Ogg. The only benefit to having Ogg in the spec itself would be to get the format more well-known, but that should happen on its merits, not because a standards body decreed it so. What is unfortunate in this instance is just how much sway a single company or pair of companies can have over a spec as a whole, and how quickly they can make changes happen. It just smacks of impropriety. I don't think anyone's going to argue that H.264 is a bad codec, but isn't the point of a standard to ensure interoperability? Why do these companies have so much clout?
Encrypt everything. Someone more knowledgeable in the area can shed more light on this, but will any of this filtering software have any discernable effect if we encrypt all communications?
Rails was borne of a production application: Basecamp. It didn't come into existence because they "hated EVERYONE!" The application had already been built in Ruby, and DHH saw that there was a lot of the system that could be reused. He packaged it up, and released it under the name "Ruby on Rails."
Rails has gotten hyped, no question, but the level of rhetoric leveled against it has gotten to the point where people are unwilling to acknowledge that it is a capable framework. Great marketing only gets you so far, and like so many other wildly popular "products," at the end of the day people tend to use what works for them. There aren't many examples - open-source or closed - of things that get lots of acclaim without deserving any of it. Your dislike of Rails has nothing to do with Rails itself, but rather how you perceive it to be portrayed. We all remember the Java hype. We all remember the .NET hype. Hype surrounds everything new, and Rails is new. The hype will die down, and when it does, what you'll find is that it will settle into its own area of web application development, right alongside all of the other great frameworks, languages, etc. Java didn't really revolutionize the world the way we were told it would. It did, however, become a very capable branch of application development, and thousands of developers make an excellent living doing it.
Sure, we sometimes joke about Ruby on Rails being "better" than the alternatives, but for professional Rails developers it's more about having a good time than anything else. It might even happen to have something to do with so many of us liking Macs - we Mac-users are a rather devoted bunch. Sometimes it's easy to read too much into it, and I think that's what has happened here. I attended RailsConf this year, and for the most part the people I met were enthusiastic developers who were making web applications and having a pretty good time doing it. If the work you're doing with not-Rails is working, there is little reason to believe that the existence of Rails or even the current enthusiasm for it is going to translate into competitive pressure you won't be able to handle. If you're good at what you do, and already have development tools and practices that work for you, none of that is going to change, and that doesn't mean you don't stand to benefit from it. Just take a look at CakePHP.
Any negative impact Rails has will be felt by the people on the fringe. Those who don't really know how to develop applications, and are ill-suited to the tasks with which they are currently tasked. Every time something comes along that attempts to elevate the discussion, there will be those unable to keep up.
That does not mean that you stop innovating. That's simply the nature of competition. If you have confidence in your work, you have nothing to fear, and more importantly, no reason to hate.
I can't take you seriously when you claim that all Rails developers are "zealots." You wear your bias on your sleeve.
As a Rails developer myself, I know for a fact I'm not out there making "mythical, false claims." When I develop solutions for clients, I sell them just that: solutions. I don't sell them Ruby on Rails solutions. I just sell them solutions. My experience is unless a client has a specific desire to use a particular framework or language (.NET and J2EE are popular requests), they don't really care. So long as the finished product does what they ask, the actual technology behind it doesn't seem to matter. I certainly see that for the not-Rails coder that Rails is your competition, but if the only reason you don't like it is because it gives someone else an opportunity, perhaps what you should be doing is picking up a book and learning what it's actually about, instead of pointing fingers.
My experience with Rails developers is that they're excited about the framework because they feel it delivers on a lot of its promise. That's certainly how I feel, although anyone who's used it for any kind of professional work will know that it isn't the be-all-end-all and that you still have to do a lot of work to get a product you're happy with. That's true for most good frameworks. They make the job easier; they don't do it for you.
Rails almost certainly isn't the first challenge of its kind you'll have faced, and it isn't going to be the last. You can't expect to code PHP and have PHP be the be-all-end-all for the rest of your career. It just doesn't work that way. New things come out, and some people adopt those things. Fighting your competition with name-calling isn't going to get you anywhere. At the end of the day, Rails hasn't seen the kind of adoption it has solely because of good marketing. At the end of the day, product actually matters, and Rails has chops.
I told him to grow up not because he disagrees with me, but rather because he assumed that anyone with my opinions must be in high school and living with his or her parents. A very childish retort, indeed, and the specific reason I said he needed to "grow up."
Seriously.. why does Ruby on Rails get so many people so fired up? If you don't like it, don't use it. If you do like it, feel free. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but for many people Rails comes pretty close. If you're not one of those people, there are plenty of other frameworks and languages.
Why do people in any kind of IT have such huge egos? It's counterproductive and at the end of the day, if you're making the client happy, and that makes your boss happy, you've done your job.
That's an awesome idea. I cannot imagine how much better the life of the web developer would be if IE actually spat out useful error messages, or had something ala Firebug.
See this comment, and then grow up.
Someone once said to aim high so failure still puts you further ahead. If you honestly think that I honestly think this is feasible overnight, you're dreaming. There's nothing wrong with talking about how things would be ideally, so we can work backward from there to find reasonable solutions. That being said, I stand by the original (-1 Flamebait) comment. Sometimes you have to be willing to take risks if you believe in something. I believe in standards.
You know what you get when demand far outstrips supply? Opportunity.
All you're really saying is you don't have the courage to do it.