3 ms·

"If we can leverage JRuby to grab 1-2% of the Java market, we'll double the size of the Ruby community" - that's pretty incredible. IMHO it could be smart of t

by nir 17y ago

"If we can leverage JRuby to grab 1-2% of the Java market, we'll double the size of the Ruby community" - that's pretty incredible. IMHO it could be smart of the community to put some effort into getting JRuby on Rails working smoothly on Google App Engine. GAE makes deployment and scaling, traditionally RoR's weaker points (though much improved since Passenger) almost a non-issue.

patio11 17y ago
I would have agreed with you on "Rails sucks to deploy" two years ago, when I started working with it, but the ecosystem is much, much better now. I don't use Passenger in production (no real benefit to a single-app developer whose app already works with Mongrel) so I won't comment on it, but Capistrano is mature to the point where deployment to a VPS is very, very painless. You should see how much fun the deploy procedure is at my day job (Big Freaking Java Enterprise App) compared to "cap _1.4.2_ deploy". As it happens I am looking at a stack of evaluations for the talk I gave internally about GAE, which included redoing an internal app on it. "Deployment is a non-issue" was not my experience. It is documented in the traditional Rails manner: as comments on blog posts, most of them out of date. It includes a lot of steps which are transparently bandaids over broken, like "Freeze Rails then delete the ActiveRecord gem to save on files because GAE has a hard limit on how many you can put in a WAR." It... bugger, meeting, will complete this thought later.
- patio11 17y ago
  Meeting over. Other things not working on GAE, at least in my limited experience: 1) There is no way to run the console, period, which is a nuisance to my typical development style. 2) There appears to be no good way to do testing, which is a showstopper for many Rails developers. (I don't do TDD personally so not a big deal for me.) 3) Warble (wonderful software, don't get me wrong) has some performance issues, at least on this computer. (30 seconds to change one line in one file.) That wouldn't be a problem except... 4) ... I can't get GAE to operate locally with Rails, which means development has to be done by edit, deploy, edit, deploy, edit, deploy, which combines all the development speed of Big Freaking Java Enterprise Apps with the rich your-IDE-will-spot-typos-for-you power of Ruby. (/sarcasm) 5) You can't use ActiveRecord on GAE, which sounds like a nuisance until you realize how much of Rails magic depends on ActiveRecord being there. Validations, for example. (This was a major GOTCHA! for us.) I hear this will be mooted with Rails 3.0, which allows DataMapper (which will support Google's data store) to be dropped in in place of AR, but it is one of the major issues making me tell my bosses "The exploratory app was a big success, but the platform is not ready for us to take it to production yet, even though you have one production-ready app sitting in front of you."
  - nir 17y ago
    Once you're at the capistrano level, deployment is a different game.. I'm talking about relatively small projects (I wouldn't deploy a big project on GAE anyway, if only to avoid the lock-in to Google) I totally agree on most of issues you raise (once GAE Rails would work locally, console, testing etc could be resolved I suppose) - I would definitely not build any size Rails project for GAE right now. But if Rails community would put some work into that, I think it might be a great rapid dev/deploy/scale solution.
jshen 17y ago
GAE is a pain in the ass regardless of the language. The only way it helps you scale (that can't be easily replicated) is the use of bigtable which has nothing to do with the language.
- deleted 17y ago
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by nir 17y ago

patio11 17y ago

I would have agreed with you on "Rails sucks to deploy" two years ago, when I started working with it, but the ecosystem is much, much better now. I don't use Passenger in production (no real benefit to a single-app developer whose app already works with Mongrel) so I won't comment on it, but Capistrano is mature to the point where deployment to a VPS is very, very painless. You should see how much fun the deploy procedure is at my day job (Big Freaking Java Enterprise App) compared to "cap _1.4.2_ deploy". As it happens I am looking at a stack of evaluations for the talk I gave internally about GAE, which included redoing an internal app on it. "Deployment is a non-issue" was not my experience. It is documented in the traditional Rails manner: as comments on blog posts, most of them out of date. It includes a lot of steps which are transparently bandaids over broken, like "Freeze Rails then delete the ActiveRecord gem to save on files because GAE has a hard limit on how many you can put in a WAR." It... bugger, meeting, will complete this thought later.

patio11 17y ago
Meeting over. Other things not working on GAE, at least in my limited experience: 1) There is no way to run the console, period, which is a nuisance to my typical development style. 2) There appears to be no good way to do testing, which is a showstopper for many Rails developers. (I don't do TDD personally so not a big deal for me.) 3) Warble (wonderful software, don't get me wrong) has some performance issues, at least on this computer. (30 seconds to change one line in one file.) That wouldn't be a problem except... 4) ... I can't get GAE to operate locally with Rails, which means development has to be done by edit, deploy, edit, deploy, edit, deploy, which combines all the development speed of Big Freaking Java Enterprise Apps with the rich your-IDE-will-spot-typos-for-you power of Ruby. (/sarcasm) 5) You can't use ActiveRecord on GAE, which sounds like a nuisance until you realize how much of Rails magic depends on ActiveRecord being there. Validations, for example. (This was a major GOTCHA! for us.) I hear this will be mooted with Rails 3.0, which allows DataMapper (which will support Google's data store) to be dropped in in place of AR, but it is one of the major issues making me tell my bosses "The exploratory app was a big success, but the platform is not ready for us to take it to production yet, even though you have one production-ready app sitting in front of you."
- nir 17y ago
  Once you're at the capistrano level, deployment is a different game.. I'm talking about relatively small projects (I wouldn't deploy a big project on GAE anyway, if only to avoid the lock-in to Google) I totally agree on most of issues you raise (once GAE Rails would work locally, console, testing etc could be resolved I suppose) - I would definitely not build any size Rails project for GAE right now. But if Rails community would put some work into that, I think it might be a great rapid dev/deploy/scale solution.

jshen 17y ago

GAE is a pain in the ass regardless of the language. The only way it helps you scale (that can't be easily replicated) is the use of bigtable which has nothing to do with the language.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]