Update: here is a follow-up to this article, written two years later.
You won’t be reading any Ruby on Rails bashing in this blog post for a simple reason: I love Ruby and I love Ruby on Rails.
Rails is a fantastic framework built on a wonderful language that appealed to me the very first day I started to study it. I think David did a fantastic job in two areas:
- Coming up with innovative ideas that take Web programming to a new level.
- Leveraging the strength of Ruby to achieve his goal.
To tell the truth, the Pick Axe and Agile Web Development with Rails books are the best two technical books I have read these past years. I read quite a few technical books, but none has caught my interest and made me look forward to resuming my reading more than these two books. And to top it all, features such as Headless Applications, as illustrated in this blog post by Mike Clark, clearly show how powerful Rails is.
There is no denying that Ruby on Rails is turning the Web programming world on its head.
Now that this introduction is out of the way, I’d like to take some time to explain why, in spite of all its qualities, Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream.
As you probably guessed, my conviction doesn’t come from technical grounds.
The truth is that there are a lot of forces involved in making a Web framework successful, but before I dive into those, allow me to tell a little side story.
Have you ever come across Smalltalk or Lisp programmers? You know, these people who, no matter what you tell them, will always respond that "Smalltalk did that twenty years ago" or that "Nothing has been invented since Lisp". They listen to you patiently with an amused light in their eyes and when you’re done talking, they will just shrug away your points and kindly recommend that you read up on a thirty-year old technology that was the last thing they ever learned and that has been dictating every single technical judgment they have offered since then.
I believe that in ten years from now, people will look back at Ruby on Rails and will have the same reaction. I’m not sure what Web frameworks we will have by then, but I’m quite convinced that a lot of the current Ruby on Rails fanatics will have the same kind of attitude: "That’s nice, but Ruby on Rails already did this ten years ago, and better".
Interestingly, they might even be right. But by then, it won’t matter because despite its technical excellence, Ruby on Rails will still be a niche technology that only experts know about.
So why do I think that Ruby on Rails will never cross the chasm?
- First of all, Ruby.
Again, and at the risk of repeating myself: I love Ruby. I truly do. It’s one of the few languages that I have studied these past years that made me go "Yeah!" whenever I read about a feature I didn’t know of yet. I find its syntax and concepts extremely elegant and powerful at the same time. I don’t like everything about it, of course, but Ruby is by far the number two language in my toolbox behind Java, with number three far, far behind. But it’s a complex language that contains a lot of advanced idioms which will be very hard for PHP and Visual Basic programmers to absorb.
Admittedly, PHP and Visual Basic are cheap targets (we’re talking about languages that don’t even have name spaces!), but like it or not, they are the Web standard. Anyone who wants to succeed in the Web arena must have a compelling story to tell to these programmers, something that will convince them to switch to Rails on technical grounds but that will also be an easy sell to their management. Rails can’t succeed without these two conditions, and I am predicting that Ruby — and Ruby on Rails — will always remain a tough sell to any organization that contains more than ten people.
- Ruby on Rails itself.
Ruby on Rails is just too advanced. I’m serious. It has an incredible amount of slick features involving a lot of magic (both Ruby-related and invented by David himself). For talented developers, these features are a dream come true… autowiring of the MVC, scaffolding, defaults over configuration, unit tests (even integration tests now, nice!), you name it. David hit every single pain point that Web developers (regular developers even) have been facing these past years. Ruby on Rails in itself is a great example of how to nicely package what we have learned about software development these past five years.
But it’s still a very wide gap for corporate developers to cross. Sometimes, too much magic is too much magic, and it can definitely be the case that the flow of code is too direct or too clever to be understandable by regular developers. Developers were able to do the jump from imperative to object-oriented programming, but it was a hard fight. I don’t believe the Web world will ever be ready to embrace the Rails cleverness.
- Still no credible IDE.
All fanatics of dynamic languages are quick to point that they don’t need an IDE to use Ruby, Python, Groovy or other. And they will quickly add that if you need one, you’re probably not being rubyic or pythonic enough and that you should probably switch back to your old language and leave the grown ups alone.
This is nonsense. Ignore these people, they don’t understand how the real world works and how developers think, and they are one of the reasons why so many great technologies never make it to the mainstream. Don’t ever be ashamed to need an IDE or to ask for one. Of course, there are bad ways to use an IDE (e.g. you want code generated for you) but if you are interested in Ruby on Rails, chances are that you are a decent developer and you know how to leverage an IDE to make you more productive than when using emacs. Code completion or navigation, debugging, refactoring, project management, source control integration, etc… there are too many features to list that make you more productive if you use a tool that enables them.
This is 2006, not 1996. The programs we are writing and the problems we are solving every day are orders of magnitude harder than back then, and our tools need to keep up with that need. Emacs is a fine text editor, but it’s no longer adequate for modern development.
- Fanaticism.
Regular readers of my blog know how strongly I feel on this topic. There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts.
- Crowd of a single mind.
If you want to write a Web application in Ruby, there is only one solution. Only one. Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails has pretty much nuked the field of Web development in Ruby, and I wonder if it’s such a good thing. For all the flak that Java receives because you can count at least a dozen different Web frameworks, there is something to be said about plurality and the constant chase for something better and different. Each framework that comes out builds on the strengths of its ancestors while discarding the errors (and committing a few mistakes of its own, of course). The field advances a little bit every time while bowing down to the timeless laws of natural selection.
I am worried that Ruby on Rails will do to the Ruby world what JUnit did to Java: a great tool when it came out but which condemned its community to an ice age where no innovation or competition appeared for years. Whatever the fate of Ruby, I hope its fans will keep an open mind and will constantly challenge the Rails way, for the simple reason that it’s always healthy to question what’s in place, no matter how good it looks.
- Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.
This is an argument that the Rails crowd doesn’t take well, and they are quick to point out BaseCamp and other products. The problem is that by now, there should be other obvious success Rails stories, and not just ones developed by the Rails Society. Of course, it’s a chicken and egg problem: a lot of companies evaluate Ruby on Rails but will only take the jump if they can find evidence that other companies have done that before them. And for now, the evidence is scarce at best.
Granted, Java took a while to rise to the enterprise challenge as well, and it did so despite tremendous initial handicaps such as poor performances and questionable specifications. I contend that until Rails goes through its own EJB2 debacle, it won’t be seen as enterprise ready.
- Lack of support from Internet Providers.
What’s the big deal with this, you ask? After all, Java is hardly supported by Internet Providers as well. The big difference is that Java on the server is targeted at the enterprise. Anyone who wants to run a Java EE application will most likely host their own servers.
Ruby on Rails is targeting a different population: the "Web sites in-between", these sites that are not massively scalable but still have more than a few visits per day. A lot of these people use external hosting, and they won’t go very far if Rails is not offered natively and pre-installed for them. PHP is a no-brainer for them, because it’s installed virtually on 99% of Internet Providers.
Of course, a little bit of .htaccess magic will allow you to run your own Rails application, whether your provider supports it or not, and assuming that they give you that amount of privileges and that you don’t need to scale too high, but until Ruby on Rails achieves at least half of the PHP penetration, it will remain inaccessible to most of the population it needs to become mainstream.
Note that I didn’t say anything about poor error reporting, weak internationalization support or Active Record, which are usually the areas where Ruby on Rails is the most criticized. I’m not worried about these because they are simply a symptom of Ruby on Rails’ youth. They will be fixed in time, and I don’t think they will play a big role in Ruby in Rails’ acceptance (or lack thereof).
So there you have it. My prediction on Ruby on Rails in one, lengthy post. I apologize for the size of this article, I usually try to keep my blog entries short and to the point. I hope at least that I achieved the latter.
I’ll conclude on a positive note: I hope I’m wrong. I really, sincerely do. For my next work, I want to have a choice between Java and Ruby, but right now, when in doubt, even I usually end up returning to Java for my personal projects for the reasons listed above.
And as you know, I love it when frameworks and languages compete for my business. But right now, I see no competition.
#1 by Amit C on June 15, 2006 - 3:24 pm
Just a note, the above blog post does not wrap lines in Firefox 1.5.x on Linux.
Pretty tough to read.
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#3 by Stuck on 1024x768 on June 26, 2006 - 8:41 am
Why don’t your lines wrap? I need an Apple 30″ Cinema display to read your weblog?
#4 by chuck on June 27, 2006 - 2:43 pm
hmmm… This page is unreadable. How did you manage to make your page 4 times wider than normal?
#5 by chuck on June 27, 2006 - 2:43 pm
hmmm… This page is unreadable. How did you manage to make your page 4 times wider than normal?
#6 by aaron on June 29, 2006 - 8:56 pm
I have been in microsoft shops for over 10 years now. which means i currently do .net(C# at the moment) and I always code at home with stuff i like. I think RoR (and Ruby) is slick. Do i feel really “weird” about the “magic”. you bet! LOL. but maybe that is not a bad thing…to stop writing all the DB infostructure and let some “magic” happen. The one thing i have learned from writing enterprise solutions with ‘enterprise’ tools is most projects are TOTALLY over-engineered. RoR is a tool, like Java, C#, PHP and VB(yes, classic VB has a place). That is all it is. Look at your project and go with what technolgy works best to make you productive. Oh, an i would love a better IDE. And web apps (not just websites) have become more complicated, i have evolved with that for over 10 years…started with notepad. in unix world i use emacs still. But an IDE is so much better. not for writting me code (i would pull all that crap out anyway) but if anything else, just for the solution or project organization alone. Hell, if i keep writing Rails apps, i might just write an IDE myself…we are developers aren’t we?? hehe
#7 by Michael on July 3, 2006 - 3:00 pm
I can’t jump in as an accomplished programmer but can add my two cents as an interested observer… Actually that’s not true, or not completely true. Instead, I’ll give you Martin Fowler’s words from RailsConf 2006 in Chicago. I just put up the complete video of it at blog.scribestudio.com .
Video from all keynotes can be found here: blog.scribestudio.com/pages/rails/
Enjoy,
#8 by Andrew on July 15, 2006 - 6:42 am
I agree with Chuck — forget cutting-edge web frameworks – can we get some word wrapping in here?
#9 by Shimon Amit on July 25, 2006 - 3:33 am
Remember lesson #1 in business studies: supply and demand. If there is demand, there will be supply. For all the tooling and services around the Ruby on Rails, there will be supply *because* there is demand. IDEs, Hosting, tooling – all those will become available as time goes by because there is plenty of demand. Growing demand.
#10 by Anonymous on August 12, 2006 - 3:48 am
i think some css wrangling is in need here.
#11 by Andrew Norris on August 12, 2006 - 10:10 pm
The community is fanatical, no question. And yeah, it’s turning into a monoculture — though my guess is that diversity in ruby web development will manifest itself in extensions to Rails for various purposes. But I don’t think that fanatics have usually prevented a technology from being adopted — they’ve just made it more annoying to adopt. It certainly hasn’t stopped Python.
Support from internet providers will come — if there’s a lot of people who want to buy something, someone will sell it to them. Likewise, an IDE or two will fall out somewhere — that’s just a matter of time.
As far as the complexity of Ruby, I call BS. If you’re in a hurry to crank out your first Rails app and are working from a decent tutorial, you can learn a functioning subset of Ruby in no time flat. You won’t understand any of the interesting parts of Ruby, but you can write functional code without it. And as bad as that sounds, it’s still leagues ahead of what novice code looks like in PHP. Likewise, there are a ton of things going on in Rails that are fantastically advanced, but it does a good job of hiding them to the novice — you can write My First Dynamic Website without understanding any of the principles underlying Rails — just the surface details of how to use it that you can glean from a tutorial.
Of course, the corollary to that is that there are going to be a lot of Rails sites produced by barely-literate codemonkeys — just like with php or asp. But that’s not a knock against the underlying technology.
The main legitimate question at this point is scalability. Right now, the whole execution path for Rails is shaky, from the single-threaded VM to the suboptimal hacks required to hook it up to a webserver. This aspect of Rails is still a mess. In my spare time, I’ve been tinkering around with a lisp interpreter running on top of asp.net, and I’m pretty sure that I would have an easier time scaling that up than doing a large-scale deployment of Rails.
#12 by plavix drug on August 17, 2006 - 10:29 am
thank
#13 by Peter Cooper on August 22, 2006 - 6:01 am
This discussion seems pointless. Why ever would we want Rails to be ‘mainstream’? Mainstream is crap. The good stuff is always more exclusive. Would you rather drive a Geo Metro or a Ferrari? Yeah.
#14 by Nate Davis on August 25, 2006 - 3:33 pm
These conversations always tend to imply that programmers must leave one language to adopt another. Why can’t I be an expert (and enjoy using) two completely different languages. I’m proud to be proficient in both Ruby and .Net and be able to use ASP.NET for one project and then RoR for another.
#15 by Nate Davis on August 25, 2006 - 3:39 pm
I believe another obstacle in RoR’s way is the Mac/Firefox centricness of the RoR core team. If you don’t use TextMate on a Mac your not a real RoR programmer. And if rubyonrails.com does not always display right in IE, who cares, just switch to FF. BS!! I want to develop RoR on a Windows machine and test my apps in IE6 and 7. I think if a RoR website doesn’t display right in IE7, it’s the developer’s fault!!
#16 by tony on September 12, 2006 - 12:47 pm
I have been a cold fusion, j2ee, and PHP developer, and I was starting to think about trying ruby out, especially ruby on rails, but that you compare it to java puts me off, in my experience it always just took twice as long and ran half as fast to use java as opposed to anything else. I believe java is only even usable because computers have gotten so powerful.
#17 by tony on September 12, 2006 - 12:47 pm
I have been a cold fusion, j2ee, and PHP developer, and I was starting to think about trying ruby out, especially ruby on rails, but that you compare it to java puts me off, in my experience it always just took twice as long and ran half as fast to use java as opposed to anything else. I believe java is only even usable because computers have gotten so powerful.
#18 by tony on September 12, 2006 - 12:49 pm
you mentioned Smalltalk or Lisp , but what about perl. I haven’t really used any of them but people are always telling me amazing almost unbelieve things about them.
#19 by tony on September 12, 2006 - 12:49 pm
you mentioned Smalltalk or Lisp , but what about perl. I haven’t really used any of them but people are always telling me amazing almost unbelieve things about them.
#20 by katalog on October 14, 2006 - 3:30 am
Remember lesson #1 in business studies: supply and demand. If there is demand, there will be supply. For all the tooling and services around the Ruby on Rails, there will be supply *because* there is demand. IDEs, Hosting, tooling – all those will become available as time goes by because there is plenty of demand. Growing demand.
#21 by Greg Bittar on October 16, 2006 - 11:54 am
the original author wrote: “This is 2006, not 1996. The programs we are writing and the problems we are solving every day are orders of magnitude harder than back then, and our tools need to keep up with that need.”
Maybe in your experience. Change the “we” to an “I”. In my experience, “we” were doing wireless object-oriented app server/db work in 1996. What were you doing?
Funny tho, you were just implying that Smalltalkers overstate the benefits you enjoy today. Maybe it’s because, in fact, they were working on those hard projects during their first iterations?
And btw, vi is a fine tool, now as much as ever. I’ll take that and the extended set of shell commands over any pictographic IDE any day. The ideas are in the mind, rather than in a menu.
#22 by George on October 18, 2006 - 9:22 am
you are wrong because: You dont need an ide in Ruby because it is clean! all thoes arguments were aganst java! ruby does not have much boilerplate code; therefor no need for IDE!!
#23 by Roseanne Zhang on October 21, 2006 - 8:18 pm
//===============
These conversations always tend to imply that programmers must leave one language to adopt another. Why can’t I be an expert (and enjoy using) two completely different languages. I’m proud to be proficient in both Ruby and .Net and be able to use ASP.NET for one project and then RoR for another.
Posted by: Nate Davis at August 25, 2006 03:33 PM //================
Haha, That is exactly what I want to say.
I have been Java developer for quite some time, and my last project was C/C++/JNI/Java. I am doing RoR now, and will do C++ at the same time. Next project might be J2ME with C++ with WAP.
I am proud of doing that…
#24 by Roseanne Zhang on October 21, 2006 - 8:20 pm
//===============
These conversations always tend to imply that programmers must leave one language to adopt another. Why can’t I be an expert (and enjoy using) two completely different languages. I’m proud to be proficient in both Ruby and .Net and be able to use ASP.NET for one project and then RoR for another.
Posted by: Nate Davis at August 25, 2006 03:33 PM //================
Haha, That is exactly what I want to say.
I have been Java developer for quite some time, and my last project was C/C++/JNI/Java. I am doing RoR now, and will do C++ at the same time. Next project might be J2ME with C++ with WAP.
I am proud of doing that…
#25 by Roseanne Zhang on October 21, 2006 - 8:21 pm
//===============
These conversations always tend to imply that programmers must leave one language to adopt another. Why can’t I be an expert (and enjoy using) two completely different languages. I’m proud to be proficient in both Ruby and .Net and be able to use ASP.NET for one project and then RoR for another.
Posted by: Nate Davis at August 25, 2006 03:33 PM //================
Haha, That is exactly what I want to say.
I have been Java developer for quite some time, and my last project was C/C++/JNI/Java. I am doing RoR now, and will do C++ at the same time. Next project might be J2ME with C++ with WAP.
I am proud of doing that…
#26 by Anonymous on October 23, 2006 - 11:33 pm
You’re right Roseanne, but some people are unable of doing that and afraid of losing their ‘market share’ …. it’s human nature…
it’s a long long story as long as IT : Assembler programmers were afraid by Cobol and tried to find many arguments against it…
a never ending story…
#27 by Ha on November 12, 2006 - 3:41 am
I agree with your assertions, but not with the reasoning behind them. Rails will not fail because of any of its numerous technical shortcomings, Rails will fail because all of its maintainers are narcissistic children whose lives revolve around IRC. Eventually one or more of them will get into some big sissy internet slapfight and go start their own IRC channels and blogs dedicated to badmouthing each other, abandoning the project altogether and leaving the teeming throngs of teenage fanboy bloggers out in the cold. Douchebag Heimlich Haggarslacks will then either sell off the project to Google and spend the rest of his life greasing his hair in the mirror and wishing there was a single human being on the planet whom he could pay enough to pretend to tolerate the sound of his voice for more than a few hours, or he’ll kill himself when his ego goes supernova and collapses in on itself. Either way, flash in the pan.
Ruby is a very nice language, and it deserves much better than Rails. I’ve never seen so much code bloat in a 1.0 release of anything, and I’ve worked at some really crappy software companies.
#28 by Ha on November 12, 2006 - 3:42 am
I agree with your assertions, but not with the reasoning behind them. Rails will not fail because of any of its numerous technical shortcomings, Rails will fail because all of its maintainers are narcissistic children whose lives revolve around IRC. Eventually one or more of them will get into some big sissy internet slapfight and go start their own IRC channels and blogs dedicated to badmouthing each other, abandoning the project altogether and leaving the teeming throngs of teenage fanboy bloggers out in the cold. Douchebag Heimlich Haggarslacks will then either sell off the project to Google and spend the rest of his life greasing his hair in the mirror and wishing there was a single human being on the planet whom he could pay enough to pretend to tolerate the sound of his voice for more than a few hours, or he’ll kill himself when his ego goes supernova and collapses in on itself. Either way, flash in the pan.
Ruby is a very nice language, and it deserves much better than Rails. I’ve never seen so much code bloat in a 1.0 release of anything, and I’ve worked at some really crappy software companies.
#29 by Hrm on November 12, 2006 - 3:43 am
I agree with your assertions, but not with the reasoning behind them. Rails will not fail because of any of its numerous technical shortcomings, Rails will fail because all of its maintainers are narcissistic children whose lives revolve around IRC. Eventually one or more of them will get into some big sissy internet slapfight and go start their own IRC channels and blogs dedicated to badmouthing each other, abandoning the project altogether and leaving the teeming throngs of teenage fanboy bloggers out in the cold. Douchebag Heimlich Haggarslacks will then either sell off the project to Google and spend the rest of his life greasing his hair in the mirror and wishing there was a single human being on the planet whom he could pay enough to pretend to tolerate the sound of his voice for more than a few hours, or he’ll kill himself when his ego goes supernova and collapses in on itself. Either way, flash in the pan.
Ruby is a very nice language, and it deserves much better than Rails. I’ve never seen so much code bloat in a 1.0 release of anything, and I’ve worked at some really crappy software companies.
#30 by God this sucks on November 12, 2006 - 3:22 pm
Also, I’m not sure you should be pointing any fingers at anyone else’s blog engine when your own fails so miserably all the time and people end up reposting the same thing over and over because of all the error messages.
#31 by Lonny Eachus on November 30, 2006 - 3:00 pm
I disagree with some of the basic premises of this article. First, while not a full-blown IDE, RadRails is a pretty darned good code editor. If you want to see your work, keep your web page open and just hit the “refresh” button. Not exactly IDE but one of the best editors around and surely the next best thing to IDE.
Further, the author states that you don’t want an IDE that generates code. That is pure nonsense! That is what IDEs do! An IDE that did not generate code would be nothing but a screen generator. It would create screenshots that do not do anything, which is just plain not useful.
As for the first objection — Ruby itself — I can personally testify that it is a non-issue. I used Visual Basic since before it was even a Windows programming platform (yes, it was available in DOS, in two different forms). So I do know Visual Basic and actuall like some things about it. I have also done a lot of coding in .NET, Java, C++ and C#.
Yet, when I actually started programming in Ruby, and got past a couple of different concepts (symbols for example), I was extremely impressed. I dropped .NET like a hot potato. There is no comparison at all. Java, while nicely structured, is too restrictive for most really creative people. Not just technically restrictive… it FEELS restrictive. A friend of mine, who had a similar experience, asked me why anybody who had been exposed to Ruby should bother to learn Java at all. I replied that Java teaches (and enforces) good programming habits, while Ruby’s freedom does not discourage sloppiness. So learn the proper way first, then carry your good habits over to the freer environment. And Ruby really is that.
The prediction that RoR will be a has-been ten years from now is pure speculation. I think that one was just pulled out of the air. I could say that about any Web tool in existence today and have an equal chance of being right.
The lack of ISP support is rapidly disappearing. Lack of support is a necessary initial condition when something new comes around… it takes time to properly support it. The very same thing was true of PHP, Perl, and even JavaScript at different times. There are LOTS of RoR-friendly hosts out there now, and if you do not think there is enterprise-level support, check out Engine Yard for one good example (http://www.engineyard.com/).
All in all, there are good rubuttals to every one of the objections to RoR listed in this article. The author is entitled to his/her opinion but I strongly disagree with most of them, and I have counterexamples on my side.
#32 by Tim on December 14, 2006 - 8:31 am
“But it’s still a very wide gap for corporate developers to cross”
Ruby is of interest to me, but basically I’ve been told I’m too dumb to understand it. Others have said this. “It’s great, but…”.
That type of attitude has turned me off and others I know. Why move to something that people like to take pride in being so hard that you have to be Mensa certified to use?
#33 by Shad Vick on January 9, 2007 - 8:41 pm
Great article…although I hope you’re wrong. It was April 2006 when you posted and now Jan 2007 – have you changed your mind yet? ; )
#34 by Les Quinn on January 12, 2007 - 7:18 am
umm…
folks last year said that RoR was a PHP killer… i just had to laugh at them then, and guess what? i’m still laughing…
can’t say much more than what you’ve said really
#35 by Nikolay on January 24, 2007 - 3:58 pm
I played around with RoR for around a month and when I started a real project, I realized something very important about RoR. It maps my db structure directly into the model classes. I know this can be changed but once you write your own SQL query, not relying on the Active Record methods, you end up rewriting the whole CRUD functionality of the class and this relates the other related classes.
Is there someone trying to use RoR for something bigger than blog (Except for the Basecamp)
I like the MVC web approach, but the convention over configuration for the db is too much for me. And what will happened when MySQL 5.1 becomes stable and we start using sql functions – Will Active Record allow us to use these. What about transactions. For now, even if I try to GROUP BY something HAVING…, it is done by adding part of the query to the one supposed to be build by Active Record.
Too much magic for me
Please prove that I’m wrong. I’ll be glad to make a second attempt to jump on that boat.
#36 by Matt on February 26, 2007 - 6:14 pm
>The problem is that by now, there should be other obvious success Rails stories, and not just ones developed by the Rails Society.
Something to keep an eye on, Daily Kos, a fairly large left-leaning political site has announced its next version will be Ruby on Rails based. It should be an interesting performance test, especially as primaries and the next elections near.
#37 by Bluto on March 24, 2007 - 8:29 pm
LISP really did do that 30 years ago …
There have been tremendous advances made in computing frameworks since LISP was invented. But LISP really did one heck of a lot of things right. I built a very large intelligent decision application in 1982 on LISP and I have never gotten drunk enough to re-write it in Java. Instead, I must port some B*stard variant of LISP to every new platform to run it.
I just did a scaling exercise for a client to re-write the application in Java last month and they decided they would just keep using ported LISP.
Bluto-the-Topologist
BTW, RoR is very good. As for scalability: I only respect horizontal scalability now, and RoR has as much as can be needed.
#38 by Tim Harper on March 24, 2007 - 10:55 pm
Nikolay
Here’s a company that’s taken on rails for a VERY large scale enterprise application, matchbin.
http://www.matchbin.com/
Use the map to go to websites set up using matchbin’s technology. All of those are sites set up with matchbin technology. Everyone of those sites uses the same backend software, and the look and feel is completely customizable. Unit testing is being employed to ensure stability, and scaling measures are in place so it will scale. The site is currently getting about ~350,000 requests per day. Rails is serving the purpose very well and the framework is proving to be one that can continue to expand without everything turning into a big mess. It’s been very successful.
Tim
#39 by Tim Harper on March 24, 2007 - 10:55 pm
Nikolay
Here’s a company that’s taken on rails for a VERY large scale enterprise application, matchbin.
http://www.matchbin.com/
Use the map to go to websites set up using matchbin’s technology. All of those are sites set up with matchbin technology. Everyone of those sites uses the same backend software, and the look and feel is completely customizable. Unit testing is being employed to ensure stability, and scaling measures are in place so it will scale. The site is currently getting about ~350,000 requests per day. Rails is serving the purpose very well and the framework is proving to be one that can continue to expand without everything turning into a big mess. It’s been very successful.
Tim
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#41 by Albert Strasheim on May 22, 2007 - 2:46 am
In your opinion, is this post still valid?
IDE: NetBeans
Enterprise capabilities: JRuby Java Integration
Scalability: Rails deployed on Glassfish
Done, done and done.
#42 by Lars (L505) on June 5, 2007 - 12:15 am
You’ll find more startup companies using RoR and even funny things like freepascal. I currently am working on a few contracts where we are using ruby, freepascal, and other niche tools. When I say startup I don’t mean just small startups, some of the people I’ve worked with are big time startups (millions of dollars of funding) or small time startups (like my own website funded by $2.00).
On some of the projects I work on, managers or programmers in the startup companies insist almost everything be done in Ruby – the One True Way attitude. But it is better than using Perl or PHP!
Regards,
Lars
#43 by Lars (L505) on June 5, 2007 - 12:18 am
By the way, this website is kind of broken (bad user experience). When I posted my message I didn’t receive any response telling me it was a successful post. It just redirected me back here and my message is not displayed. I think this is the reason there are quite a few double posts in the comments above – because people were unsure if their message was posted so they resubmitted. Is this blog, perhaps, written with Ruby? I hope not, otherwise I will have a negative thing to say about Ruby developers
#44 by Lars (L505) on June 5, 2007 - 12:20 am
Also, when I preview my post, there is an option for entering a website URL for reference.
But before I preview the post, there is no URL text widget available. This again is a user experience issue that should be looked into. Not that some of my web programs don’t have similar flaws which are written in freepascal, ruby, etc.
#45 by Anon on July 25, 2007 - 2:23 pm
http://www.cio.com/article/125851/Why_Ruby_on_Rails_Succeed
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#47 by Todd on August 17, 2007 - 6:10 pm
Well, I guess article has proved wrong…
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#49 by Chris Neumann on October 5, 2007 - 9:38 pm
Getting away from shawls and viagra for a while!!!
In regard to the original post on ROR : –
1/ Yes, the Ruby language can be complex, but never illogical or seemingly abstract, something which could never be said of PHP or .NET. These die hard mainstrem programmers are not fools and must surely be able to see the merits of Ruby. How many are secretly wishing their company would allow them to embrace it?
2/ Surely advanced in ROR’s case doesn’t mean overly difficult to learn. I don’t consider myself to be anything special when it comes to web development, but with only a brief grounding in asp.net and php, I have found adapting to ROR both easy and quickly rewarding.
3/ Up until recently, I would have agreed with the no credible IDE statement, but Aptana has certainly come of age as have many of the other text editor/IDE’s available. More importantly Borland has now jumped on the bandwagon with the release of arguably the most comprehensive Ruby dedicated IDE ever (see http://www.codegear.com/products/3rdrail). If this proves to be what it purports, then I believe Ruby will have something akin to Visual Studio to back it (BTW there is also a VS plug-in available called Ruby In Steel).
4/ ROR fanatics make no apologies for their fanaticism….sorry!!!
5/ OK, so ROR has “nuked the field” but that is because it is so damn good. Probably the reason so many converts are fanatics!! I see no reason why, in the future, other clever developers will launch their own frameworks but at present most are content to embrace and add to the ROR framework, probably out of respect for its inherent design capabilities.
6/ My, how long a year can be in the developer’ world. There are now many enterprise success stories with ROR and I’m sure many more to come. As for scalability, well I believe that has been proven also
7/ Hosting is not only available but is widely available,and extremely cost effective.
#50 by Chris Neumann on October 5, 2007 - 9:42 pm
Sorry for all the typing errors above!!