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

by jshen 14y ago

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.
        jules 14y ago
        > I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. No, certainly not! I think Rails is fine for 99% of web sites, and probably the framework that has the highest percentage of sites where it would be my top choice. But Play is also fine for lets say 98% of web sites. Rails even works fine for things like chat applications, but there it would not be my top choice (at least not for the component that serves the messages). That's all I'm saying. Rails is my favorite framework, I just don't think that it is better than everything else in every respect. You are probably looking at this from a different perspective. Of course it's not worth moving an existing site off Rails if it is already done, or when you'd have to learn a completely new language and framework to do it. But if you are at the start of a project, and you already know e.g. Scala and Play, the situation may be different.

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

by 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.
        jules 14y ago
        > I think you are implying that rails sweet spot is a small portion of that space. No, certainly not! I think Rails is fine for 99% of web sites, and probably the framework that has the highest percentage of sites where it would be my top choice. But Play is also fine for lets say 98% of web sites. Rails even works fine for things like chat applications, but there it would not be my top choice (at least not for the component that serves the messages). That's all I'm saying. Rails is my favorite framework, I just don't think that it is better than everything else in every respect. You are probably looking at this from a different perspective. Of course it's not worth moving an existing site off Rails if it is already done, or when you'd have to learn a completely new language and framework to do it. But if you are at the start of a project, and you already know e.g. Scala and Play, the situation may be different.