Friday, 8 June 2007
Rails
« New Build | Main | Contacts »I don't normally listen to podcasts because they're long and linear and I can't scan past the boring parts as easily. However Norm Richards turned me on to this Drunk and Retired podcast about Rails that I listened to in the background while doing clerical work. It is good to hear some of the things I've observed technically as well as some of the community issues that I'm oblivious to. They didn't talk about things like the transaction API and stuff that guarantee unmaintainable un-reusable crappy code... What is interesting is what a lemming this guy is, so why use rails? I mean I do love Ruby, don't get me wrong...its Rails that I think is crap.
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Well I don't generally get called to do grandma's addressbook size projects. In any case its primarily active record and the handling of transactions that caused my dismissal out of hand. I agree that it is far more promising now that we see some actual criticism instead of all roses and rainbows and "400% !".
Could you elaborate on the problems w/ Active Record, i.e. handling of Tx, or point me to some authoritative information.
Why? I have no dog in this fight. There are no authorities because there is never any money for unbiased third party reviews. Only vendors saying "your stuff sucks" and the other vendor saying "no it doesn't". Basically it only offers an imperative transaction API. This means you've got to litter your code with begin/end/rollback calls. If you take one section of code and in one case you need it to join an existing transaction and in another situation you need it in its own transaction you end up having to duplicate the function or write a lot of wrapper code if/then/else. At least in ruby you don't have this stupid try catch hell. Even in EJB2 which sucked horribly and was a big reason why I called the Java Communist Party (The EJB is good because it is the work of the party and the party is good because it made the EJB... The are a number of problems with active record but let's just show you what I think you need in a big system and you draw your own conclusions because like I said, I have no dog in this fight.
https://rhstack.108.redhat.com/articles/2007/02/09/design-issues-in-high-performance-transactional-applications-using-Java-and-Linux.html
Despite it's rather obvious technical flaws, I do think there is a place for Rails. If I were an individual consultant creating small sites and wanted to be able to pop in and out of projects rapidly, I would absolutely put Rails on my short list of possible technologies.
It definitely moves up a notch now that you are seeing the rail community be more willing to openly discuss the many flaws and limitations of Rails. Still, until they abandon ActiveRecord, I'm not sure I could really feel comfortable choosing it.