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There is a huge amount of hate on HN against Rails lately. Most of it amounts to the straw man attack of "Rails is bloated and old, Node/insert tiny framework h
by jkahn 15y ago
There is a huge amount of hate on HN against Rails lately. Most of it amounts to the straw man attack of "Rails is bloated and old, Node/insert tiny framework here is where it's at".
I code with Rails. With Rails 3.2, I'm more productive than I've ever been. What others call "bloat", I call "features". It is surprisingly good having an out of the box asset pipeline for optimization of JS/CSS. The simplicity with which you can construct and adjust scoped queries with ActiveRecord is astounding. The ease of adding pre-baked authentication and authorization gems is great.
Seriously - screw writing a large data-driven web app in a tiny framework. You get so much for free in Rails.
Yes, Rails has some issues. It has a long initial load time. Ruby is not the fastest language. My main complaint about Rails at the moment would be that it moves too quickly - not that it moves too slow. If you're writing an app to service millions of users simultaneously (and not charging for it), the speed might be an issue. I haven't found it to be a problem in my company, where we charge money for what we write.
And on this change - I'm not fussed either way, but it's certainly good that Rails core mention this on the Rails blog so that Rails developers are aware of it well before 4.0 comes out. And standards compliance is a good enough reason for me.
- ticks 15y agoThe way I see it, HN has lots of people who jump on and off of bandwagons, even before standard developers have the opportunity to use them. These sorts of negative comments are a sign that the tool is becoming mainstream, which is a good thing.
- adriand 15y agoThis is a good, solid assessment of what Rails 3.2 is like to work with. Like you, I don't totally understand where the animosity towards Rails is coming from. If you want to make a drum machine that runs in your browser, like Giles Bowkett, then perhaps Ruby on Rails is really not good for you. On the other hand, if you want to earn a living, then the tremendous ease with which you can produce a reliable, secure, and full-featured application with Rails is really quite astounding. I do think that some of the criticism around the thick-client support in Rails is justified, however. Rails was ahead of the pack when it came to AJAX support in the early days, but it is not leading the way when it comes to thick-client architecture. At the same time, however, when the core developers announced that Rails would default to Coffeescript, half of the developer community freaked out, including many people here on HN. At this point, there are so many people with a stake in Rails it is impossible to please them all.
- sandGorgon 15y agoQuick question - how do you work with the asset pipeline in development mode. Did you not find it much, much slower than pre-asset Rails ?
- jkahn 15y agoIn 3.1 it ran like molasses in dev mode. Fortunately someone came out with the rails-dev-tweaks gem that largely fixed that. 3.2 is fine in dev mode.
- rapind 15y agoI swear it's like hipsters have taken over software development. I'm very happy with where rails is at right now. I feel incredibly productive with it. I get to play with new fancy stuff because I know it's still there to bail me out and get it done fast when I need to. I find neither a suit nor skinny jeans comfortable. Instead rails fits like a well worn in pair of jeans and a plain old t-shirt. Sell the hipster crap somewhere else.