Has Rails jumped the shark?

http://cageface.blogspot.com/2010/02/has-rails-jumped-shark_23.html

by cageface • 16 years ago

14 17 16 years ago

cageface.blogspot.com

jrockway• 16 years ago

Sounds like the author should just go back to PHP. No need to worry about excessive abstraction there.

cageface• 16 years ago

I've been coding Rails apps since 2004. Java before that. Never did the PHP thing.

knuckle_cake• 16 years ago

tl;dr: Author has hurdle updating app to Rails 3, so Rails has now jumped the shark.

icey• 16 years ago

Yeah... I'm not terribly sure why this submission is getting upvotes - having a hard time installing a beta (and I guess the way Rails is organized?) is eons away from Rails jumping the shark.

dougp• 16 years ago

The only extra "configuration" I have experienced with rails 3 is adding routes as I used to abuse the default routes. But yes they decoupled a lot of things but it's not like you have to require them through xml config files there is no change in set up. It still works as usual in the default configuration This is just link bait.

jpcx012• 16 years ago

I ditched rails long ago because it's simplicity was an absolute nightmare when you actually wanted to build something that wasn't a clone of basecamp.

From my experience so far, Rails3 is a breath of fresh air. Easy to get up and running, and also easy to extend and replace the pieces you dont want. My current Rails3 app doesnt use any ActionView at all (used my own view system) and its working great so far. This wouldn't have been even remotely possible in Rails 2.3.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

"From my experience so far, Rails3 is a breath of fresh air."

I'm curious to know if you've tried any of the dozen or so other Ruby Web frameworks, such as Ramaze, Camping, Sinatra, IOWA, Waves, etc.?

It seems that the things people seem so excited about in Rails 3 have been available since, say, Nitro, four or five years ago.

jpcx012• 16 years ago

Yup, tried them all (merb was the one i landed on for core dev work). So far Rails3 seems much better than all of them.

Community, documentation matter. Also having an active core team. Rails 3 seems like the best of breed web framework for now.

teilo• 16 years ago

Not having even played with Rails since the 1.x days, I find this all very interesting. I have been using Django for a while now, and what you describe here is exactly what impressed me about Django. If I didn't like something in the core, it was trivial to switch it out. I tried 4 different templating engines within a two week period, and that was when I was a Django newbie.

I think the author of this article needs to get out a bit and look around at the rest of the web framework world. Rails building on existing components is Not A Bad Thing, because it means that Rails has taken a decided turn away from being a monolithic framework toward being a set of well-formed but loosely coupled components. Light as a feather, stings like a bee, baby.

Looks like I'll be playing with Rails 3 in the near future.

mhartl2• 16 years ago

It's too bad the author doesn't appear to have (virtually) attended the recent Rails online conference (http://en.oreilly.com/railswinter10). I don't think anyone who did could possibly think that Rails is going to do anything but totally crush going forward.

Rails 3 will still have opinionated defaults; it will just be easy to swap them out for other options. Most newbies will still use the default stack,* but experts (who always insist on customization) will have a much easier time than they currently do.

* Readers of my Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://www.railstutorial.org/book) will use RSpec instead of the default Test::Unit. Currently (with Rails 2.3.5) this requires some fiddly configuration but---thanks to the modularity the article's author disparages---RSpec will feel like a default test framework in Rails 3. For example, by configuring Rails 3 to use RSpec, commands like

  $ rails generate model User

will automagically use RSpec instead of Test::Unit.

aditya• 16 years ago

You can do script/generate rspec_model User with 2.3.5 right now.

mhartl2• 16 years ago

Indeed; see

http://www.railstutorial.org/chapters/modeling-and-viewing-u...

from my book for an example. ;-) But it requires running a special bootstrap script and has a different syntax from the default, i.e.,

  $ script/generate rspec_model User

for RSpec vs.

  $ script/generate model User

for the default Test::Unit. In Rails 3, they will both simply be

  $ rails generate model User

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

I tweeted a joke earlier today that with Rails3 we have to go from complaining about Rails being monolithic to complaining that it has too many dependencies. Right on cue...

sunkencity• 16 years ago

What I like about rails is that I don't have to build my own frankenstack of ORM, templating system etc. It's all in there, and the things work perfectly together. If I have special needs for components I don't use Rails, I (mostly) use compojure instead.

I'm looking forward to the changes in Rails 3, but I'm sure I'm going to like using the default components that are most likely to work happy together.

jeremymcanally• 16 years ago

He does realize that Rails required well over half those things in versions lower than 3, right?

And it now generates 30 fewer files?

And the only reason you didn't get nasty backtraces before was that they cleaned the backtrace, which it looks it's not doing for that un-upgraded app?

Some people are such curmudgeons for no good reason.

tptacek• 16 years ago

The author asks whether his metrics (number of gem dependencies, number of auto-generated file, and length of stack traces) are meaningless. This commenter has an answer. It is, "yes, those are meaningless metrics".

1. The number of gem dependencies for Rails is an implementation detail, optimized for the benefit of people developing Rails extensions, and barely exposed to Rails developers. 80% of Rails developers couldn't tell you whether a method was defined in activesupport or activerecord, and those are two Rails dependencies that date back to the origin of Rails.

2. Since you don't have to edit any auto-generated file you're not interested in, the number of auto-generated files is irrelevant to you. Since the beginning, Rails has generated files that you're unlikely to care about; for instance, the only benefit I get from "schema.rb" is that I can make impressive printouts from it.

3. You can filter your stack traces, which is what you should do regardless of whether Rails tacks 10 lines to it or 100.

Has Rails jumped the shark? Maybe. I find myself reaching for Sinatra now instead of Rails, and I think the RESTful/Resourceful/multi-format idioms in modern Rails are overkill for most applications. But this article doesn't make a compelling argument about Rails.

regularfry• 16 years ago

"2. Since you don't have to edit any auto-generated file you're not interested in, the number of auto-generated files is irrelevant to you."

Not true. If you're learning the framework, or trying to figure out what's changed, you won't necessarily know which files are relavant and which aren't.

Has Rails jumped the shark?

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