Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream

Rails
1

Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000382.html

Kind of interesting, but didn’t convince me. Though, yeah, I can imagine
a lot of naive programmers sticking with PHP and VB (the type of crowd
that also doesn’t run their own servers, so they’re dependent on hosts
offering Rails for them). Rails DOES have an IDE - soon to be two, and
there are many other alternatives. The JUnit comparison is kind of
worrisome, but I think there’s competition from frameworks like Django.

Joe

2

I don’t think the JUnit comparison holds much weight at all. I’ll
admit that I’m not entirely aware of community when JUnit first came
out, but I’m willing to bet the majority of users were developers
already committed to Java that were pleased to find a usable testing
framework. Compare this to ROR users, who are developers that are
looking for a better way to write webapps. When it doesn’t apply well
to a given situation, we’ll be more willing and able to seek out
better solutions. When those better solutions don’t exist, we’ll be
better equipped to roll our own. Rails is not in the same boat as
JUnit, simply because the users’ mentalities are so different.

Perhaps Cedric is right though - perhaps Rails will never make the
mainstream, if by mainstream we mean adopted by ISPs and “enterprise”
users. Who cares? I’m not writing basic scripts that I intend to
offer to thousands of people, so I don’t need ISPs to support it. I
certainly don’t need the software community approval to write apps in
Rails.

I might be wrong, but I have a feeling that Dave would take a Get Real
approach to the “Rails will never…” arguments:

“It just doesn’t matter.”

Pat

3

“It just doesn’t matter.”

I will have to agree. It should not matter to us (Rails fans).

One very good and important point in that article is that Rails offers
the biggest advantage when you’re a talented developer. I don’t know
if you guys will agree, but I don’t believe Rails is “easy”; it does
assume you know about about most of the design patterns popular in web
development. I gave up trying to convince my peers to use Rails when I
realized that a lot of them simply didn’t know about or at least
recognize the usefulness of things like MVC, automated testing, or
even just an ORM layer like ActiveRecord.

PHP is popular not because it’s better than Rails or any other
specific development platform, but because it lets you type <?= print "hello world" ?> without requiring you to set up configuration files
or write unit tests. PHP allows you to be stupid. The most successful
PHP application out there – a certain very popular weblog engine –
happily ignores all the things most of us learned over the last couple
of years, and even goes as far as using globals inside functions, and
similar atrocities. It’s constantly broken, but the developers patch
things up fast, and things keep moving, somehow. Voodoo programming.
Many of the plugins available for said weblog application were
developed by designer types who had never before developed any kind of
software. Maybe that is PHP’s single biggest strength; it lets you get
started cheap and hack things together that, more often than not,
work. Without thinking too much about what the heck you’re doing.

So maybe it’s only the 5% of us who know their MVC and ORM and TDD and
WTF who can really see the beauty of Rails. How should it ever become
mainstream? And who would want it to?

  • Hendrik

–

4

“It just doesn’t matter”

I for one, really don’t give two shits if Ruby or Rails goes mainstream
or
enterprise, as I have absolutely no desire to build something in these
arenas. Mainstream or enterprise is a euphemism for “really crappy,
mediocre stuff masquerading as important.”

Ruby and Rails are not about being easy and as such they really aren’t.
You
have to be willing to get up off of you fat ass and do something towards
advancing your learning if you want to be good at this stuff it takes a
lot
of effort, maybe even more effort than what can reasonably be expected
of
your average Joe IT department worker bee.

At a party surrounded by PHP and Java community I’ll make a show of
being a
proponent of Rails going mainsteam and do my best as a fanboy to get
defensive when they beat dead horses again like scalability, but
secretly I
have more to gain if Rails doesn’t go mainstream, it helps separate the
wheat from the chaff, I charge a premium for quality. Mainstream comes
with
a lot of baggage.

Ruby and Rails are the new hot chicks in the room, and don’t be
surprised if
yesterday’s news doesn’t like all the attention they get.

Tim C.
[email protected]

5

One point of his that I sort of agree with is that rails may be so
popular that it snuffs
out interesting projects like Nitro/Og, camping, etc. I really hope that
the legions of
aspiring new Rubyists attracted by the bright lights of rails will
discover and help
improve these other options. It would also be really interesting to try
porting Og into
rails!

b

6

I read this a bit ago, and while I don’t think his points are far off I
think the title might better be “Why Ruby on Rails isn’t Mainstream
Now”.
Almost all characteristics he has issues with have been seen in every
other
platform that today is “common” or “established”. Considering that Rails
has
really only hit the mainstream (and 1.0 release) in the past YEAR, these
kinds of arguments don’t hold a lot of water.

…this coming from a Java and JRuby developer, too.

7

Joe wrote:

Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000382.html

  • First of all, Ruby

“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.”

:: shrug :: I routinely see people trying to nail 2x4s together with
Hickory Farms Smoked Sausages. I don’t mind, I eventually get their
business (or someone else talented does).

  • 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).”

Meh. DHH, unlike David Copperfield, allows you to get at the
underpinnings of the magic. I don’t care about the core of the magic.
I admit I’m curious, but I really don’t care how everything is routed,
etc, as long as it follows my directions. One day I’ll probably
download the source code and take a look at some of it (go ahead and do
that with PHP, or VB.NET–we’ll see you in a couple of weeks in the case
of PHP, and we all know what we’d see for the latter case). As far as
the app itself goes, my pattern is to run a generate scaffold command on
everything… Hey look! The magic is gone… :: shrug ::

  • Still no credible IDE.

:: blink :: I’ve been coding Java, PHP, and RoR code in the same editor
along with my source code repository (both CVS and SVN) integration, and
database stuff. It’s called Eclipse… Use it. You’ll thank yourself
for it and want to hunt down the developers in the afterlife so you can
buy them a drink. Eclipse works on all major platforms I can think of,
apparently there are some issues with RadRails and OS X (which makes me
sad because I’m wanting to switch). But it looks like there is a good
alternative on that platform too. Hell RadRails even makes it easier to
manage your “WEBrick” servers and use code generators. You get terminal
output right in the damn IDE!

Bah! Humbug on this point.

  • Fanaticism

Yes, be nice, don’t always insult the narrow-minded. :: cough ::

RoR is not itself a holy grail in an “enterprise” sense. In combination
with core Ruby, it may be. There’s nothing preventing you from doing
some complex stuff on an application server level with J2EE, C, C++, C#
or anything else and integrating it with RoR. All you have to do is
write to a database…you do have a database server, right?

JBoss Application Server

  • processes incoming files with a timed MBean
  • generates reports (using OpenOffice UNO – xls, doc, pdf, …)
  • drops complex detail and summary information into database
  • drops rows into a database notifying users of the results

RoR Front End

  • makes it all pretty

I expect the initial part could be developed in pure Ruby, but I have no
experience with it. I do have experience with Java, C??, and such.
It would be easily done and very powerful. I want to gut the core of
one of our major J2EE apps and refactor it to use this methodology. It
would be much faster overall and easier to maintain.

  • Crowd of a single mind

“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.”

Yup. A lot of lost time, revenue, and a ton of Google AdSense
accounting from all the web searches trying to figure out what the hell
is wrong with said framework and which framework would be a better idea
to switch to.

It’s true that questioning and innovation are great, indeed neccessary.
But I don’t need 12 frameworks. I need something that justworks. Time
is money. Fast development means I can spend more time doing other
things. Although it is fun to develop in RoR. :slight_smile: I think DHH has laid
the groundwork for innovation. I don’t think that will end…

  • Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.

Bah. Java 1 was slower than molasses in an antarctic blizzard. It’s
now dubbed as the #1 enterprise language (by most people that aren’t in
the Microsoft camp). I wouldn’t code everything for an enterprise app
in RoR. I would code the web interface in RoR. Everything else would
be provided via backend apps (Java, Ruby, whatever…see above) or
available via Web Services (utilizing the same backend stuff). All you
need is data in the database for RoR to get it. You can get it there
quickly by about three hundred eight different methods. Again, pick up
your Sausages everyone, we have ten houses to build and each one of them
is completely different! But that doesn’t matter, if the sausage fails
at least you have lunch…while you try to find a slightly
different-looking sausage that will work better! :: shrug ::

  • Lack of support from Internet Providers

Somewhat valid. However, this is where consultants can help. There are
plenty of RoR compatible ISPs. This is something you ask your client up
front. “Well, we use a different technology that allows us to develop
applications in about a fifth of the time as a standard web application.
It may require you to switch hosting servers; we would be happy to help
you with the details of that adjustment. Yes, it will probably cost you
about two more dollars per month. Yes, about twenty to thirty dollars
per year. Oh, did we mention that you’ll probably make about a hundred
times more back by not paying us for the extra 4/5s of the development
time?”

Yes, you can’t download a CMS and install it on any old web server (not
that that is exactly easy anymore either…and many CMS packages have
shut down servers therefore suspending hosting accounts). So if you
want to do that, I guess RoR isn’t for you. But those clients hunt for
developers in the $0-100 range anyway. I’m well beyond that range. :slight_smile:
Smart people pay a premium for good software. And they are rewarded for
it.

My Summmary:

I think that RoR “replacing” PHP in the “mainstream” does boil down to
ISP support and integration on a more wide-scale basis. That’s not
exactly RoR’s target market though. I see it much more likely to
replace JSP and PHP front-ends in “enterprise” development. And the
mid-level of client-based web apps. I’ve helped a few friends get a PHP
fansite or something up… It would be just as easy to help them get a
RoR one up.

8

Really, folks, if it becomes mainstream, then we lose a good deal of
competitive advantage. I dread the day when RoR becomes common enough
that everyone is doing web apps the smart way. After that, I can’t claim
10x faster development, can I?

9

Hendrik M. wrote:

One very good and important point in that article is that Rails offers
the biggest advantage when you’re a talented developer. I don’t know
if you guys will agree, but I don’t believe Rails is “easy”; it does
assume you know about about most of the design patterns popular in web
development. I gave up trying to convince my peers to use Rails when I
realized that a lot of them simply didn’t know about or at least
recognize the usefulness of things like MVC, automated testing, or
even just an ORM layer like ActiveRecord.

I have a bit more input on this point…

My background is in hardware design, signal processing, some coding
theory. I decided I needed to develop a web-based application after
realizing I needed a database application. I hadn’t done anything
with web-based programming since circa 1994 when Perl was on top. I
started reading a book on PHP and MySQL and quickly came to a lot of
nice realizations.

I had read about this Rails thing and decided since I was a newbie I
might give it a shot. I quickly realized that I could develop 10x
faster than I could under the PHP stuff I had been working with.
(caveat: I learned about the availability of frameworks after moving
to Rails, so I don’t quite know how using PHP frameworks would have
affected me)

I leared a lot about web development from my into to Rails. So I
wouldn’t say that only experienced web developers “get it”. I would,
however, agree that the Rails advantage is best understood by those that
have been burned by particular “not best practices” in the software
world. I’m not a software pro, but I wouldn’t put myself at the top of
the pack.

Just another datapoint.

Jake