Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson

http://blog.learnstreet.com/?p=255

by jdaudier • 13 years ago

43 19 13 years ago

blog.learnstreet.com

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

I'd be curious as to exactly what features comprised the first released version of rails. Was it originally in the MVC structure we know today, or was it more a mixture of random parts that were refactored into that later?

Did it use a CGI model, or did it embed webbrick from the start? etc.

ebarendt• 13 years ago

You can see all the gems back to 2004 here: http://rubygems.org/gems/rails/versions. Github has the 1.2 branch: https://github.com/rails/rails/tree/1-2-stable

fizx• 13 years ago

I used rails 0.8, which was a couple months after rails 0.5, the first released version. It was the same mvc structure, centered around activerecord, actioncontroller, and erb views. It embedded webrick for development, and production was a heinous cobbled-together choice of fcgi, fastcgi, or pcgi that you were expected to figure out for yourself.

damoncali• 13 years ago

It wasn't terribly different. Old apps are still recognizable as rails. It is just more polished now, and a few head scratchers have died off like RJS and components, and a lot has been refined. The biggest differnces are probably the asset pipeline, bundler, and UJS. Production hosting was an absolute nightmare. I never did understand it. Thankfully, it got better quickly.

Luyt• 13 years ago

I made a transcription of a FLOSS interview with DHH about Rails, Ruby, and how he became a programmer.

http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heineme...

From that interview: "The wonderful thing about the Web is that it divorces the notion of the native environment from the implementational technology. Any piece of programming language can spit out HTML and JavaScript, which means that you can build it in whatever the hell you want. It can be a tiny program. _You_ can invent a language and you can start using it and your users will not know the difference. So it really is this great equalizer in the sense of allowing new technologies to spring up and get serious traction because they don't need those network effects."

milkshakes• 13 years ago

Error establishing a database connection.

I guess they didn't ask him any questions about caching or scalability...

jdaudier2• 13 years ago

Ok - should be fixed now.

josh2600• 13 years ago

I was gonna say, it's not like I wanted to read it or anything.

Are you guys running a reverse proxy? It kinda looks like a naked Wordpress install that's borked. Really interested in the article; looking forward to you guys getting back online!

As a unit of measure, when I hit the top 10 on HN I get about 6-8000 hits in the day. I would imagine that a DHH article would be 5-10x of that.

crisnoble• 13 years ago

>JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around.

Does that mean that HTML is not there to decorate JavaScript? Or is he dinging Backbone and the other JS MV* frameworks cropping up.

dchuk• 13 years ago

The latter.

smrtinsert• 13 years ago

Conflict of interests. The server side is dying.

jsnk• 13 years ago

"JavaScript is there to decorate HTML, not the other way around."

Would it be fair to say this is a subtle jab at JavaScript used on the server side, namely what nodejs is doing?

gkop• 13 years ago

No, it's a jab at client-side frameworks like Angular and Ember.

admyral• 13 years ago

Digging for controversy? He's pretty opinionated on where he feels JavaScript fits into the stack. Should be completely expected coming from the creator of a server side framework.

kyllo• 13 years ago

No, he means the application logic should be on the server side, not in the browser. I doubt he has a problem with server-side Node.js.

tieTYT• 13 years ago

I wonder what his opinion about Functional Programming is.

Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson

Related Stories