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Rails is now like Java EE because it is no longer better than the competition. It's not that Rails got worse. Perhaps in simplicity it did get worse a bit, but

by jules 14y ago

Rails is now like Java EE because it is no longer better than the competition. It's not that Rails got worse. Perhaps in simplicity it did get worse a bit, but overall Rails now is much better than Rails then. The thing is that the competition got a lot better too. The baseline changed. I don't think the thing that will be to Rails as Rails was to Java EE exists yet though. The competition has merely caught up, perhaps a little ahead on some fronts and a little behind on others. But there is nothing that is clearly much much better. Things like Meteor and Opa are a step in the right direction, but they don't go far enough (yet). Does anybody remember this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY This is not the original Rails video, it's the second one I think, but they're fairly similar (couldn't find the original). Back then when I saw the first Rails video I remember finding it amazing. Now it's just boring.

jshen 14y ago
I have yet to see any competition that is better. What do you think is better?
- jules 14y ago
  Surely you don't think that Rails is better than everything else in every single respect? There are plenty of frameworks that are simpler (Flask/Sinatra), faster (Play, etc.), support lightweight concurrency better (node.js based, Play too, etc.), have much better IDE support (ASP.NET MVC), support client/server partitioning (Meteor/Opa), and so forth.
  - jshen 14y ago
    What you just said is very different from the first sentence of the comment I replied to. Let me repeat it, "Rails ... is no longer better than the competition." I think rails is better than the competition if my goal is to make fairly standard websites. It would be a rare exception where I think something else is more suitable.
    - jules 14y ago
      "No longer better than the competition" doesn't mean "Worse than the competition for ALL use cases". The thing is these frameworks have caught up so much on the expressiveness front that their other advantages can easily start to outweigh the small advantage that Rails has there. But if you are building a low traffic CRUD site (like most sites), then yeah use Rails. If you are building say a chat application, I wouldn't use Rails.
      - jshen 14y ago
        The dismissive use of "low traffic" bothers me. We made http://disney.com http://disney.com on rails, it runs off a couple of VMs, is really fast, and serves a significant amount of traffic. Can you quantify what you mean by low traffic?
        jules 14y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that building a high traffic site in Rails is not a good idea, merely that low traffic is its sweet spot. If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware. This also depends on many other factors. For example if your content is low write high read, i.e. highly cacheable, that can make any difference pretty much disappear.
        jshen 14y ago
        Let me try to be more specific. If we consider the space of web development, I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. I feel strongly that a very large portion of the entire web dev space is within rails sweet spot. I think I can back this up, as I did once already with http://disney.com http://disney.com as an example. "If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware" I've worked on numerous sites that are in the top 1000 traffic wise according to alexa. I never once felt that it was worth moving them off of rails/ruby. You are probably talking about the top 0.01% of sites or even lower than that.

by jules 14y ago

jshen 14y ago

I have yet to see any competition that is better. What do you think is better?

jules 14y ago
Surely you don't think that Rails is better than everything else in every single respect? There are plenty of frameworks that are simpler (Flask/Sinatra), faster (Play, etc.), support lightweight concurrency better (node.js based, Play too, etc.), have much better IDE support (ASP.NET MVC), support client/server partitioning (Meteor/Opa), and so forth.
- jshen 14y ago
  What you just said is very different from the first sentence of the comment I replied to. Let me repeat it, "Rails ... is no longer better than the competition." I think rails is better than the competition if my goal is to make fairly standard websites. It would be a rare exception where I think something else is more suitable.
  - jules 14y ago
    "No longer better than the competition" doesn't mean "Worse than the competition for ALL use cases". The thing is these frameworks have caught up so much on the expressiveness front that their other advantages can easily start to outweigh the small advantage that Rails has there. But if you are building a low traffic CRUD site (like most sites), then yeah use Rails. If you are building say a chat application, I wouldn't use Rails.
    - jshen 14y ago
      The dismissive use of "low traffic" bothers me. We made http://disney.com http://disney.com on rails, it runs off a couple of VMs, is really fast, and serves a significant amount of traffic. Can you quantify what you mean by low traffic?
      - jules 14y ago
        I didn't mean to imply that building a high traffic site in Rails is not a good idea, merely that low traffic is its sweet spot. If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware. This also depends on many other factors. For example if your content is low write high read, i.e. highly cacheable, that can make any difference pretty much disappear.
        jshen 14y ago
        Let me try to be more specific. If we consider the space of web development, I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. I feel strongly that a very large portion of the entire web dev space is within rails sweet spot. I think I can back this up, as I did once already with http://disney.com http://disney.com as an example. "If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware" I've worked on numerous sites that are in the top 1000 traffic wise according to alexa. I never once felt that it was worth moving them off of rails/ruby. You are probably talking about the top 0.01% of sites or even lower than that.