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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Rails for 12 years, over at least a couple dozen apps. I use RVM to manage my environments, and use Capistrano to deploy. I've hosted on full servers, on shared servers, and on Heroku. With the exception of the classic bugaboo of getting the older execjs compiled in different environments, I have never had the sort of problems you say you're having trying to keep gems sorted. In fact, I would have said that was one of the stacks' greatest strengths, to keep that sorted out for you. I guess my takeaway is that RVM > rbenv, but I REALLY don't intend to start a flamewar about it.

And please don't try to tell us that a real-world Java web application is simpler than, well, anything. ;-)

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Are you hosting multiple ruby versions and multiple apps on one server? Because as I explain below, that is the main (but not the only) cause of many issues.

Execjs, libreadline, libsqlite3, lib-postgres, (older)nokogiri etc. Quite a lot of the headers keep being a problem. Not major, often a mere ddg+apt-get away, but still annoying. It does get problematic when you have multiple apps depend on different libreadlines, for example.

And I'm not often deploying java, but at least the runtime and tooling has become omnipresent. The latest deploys were a mere "move all files there, and restart the service". With Rails you at least need to rebuild the gems.

Often java-services are an `apt get jenkins` away. There is no equivalent apt-get gitlab or apt-get mastodon that just sets up the stack entirely. But that is probably due to their popularity more than technology.

The solution you're looking for is Docker. Gitlab distributes as a Docker image.

> And please don't try to tell us that a real-world Java web application is simpler than, well, anything. ;-)

Tongue in cheek, but honestly, that's probably debatable.

Under the hood, Java apps (at least in my experience) are Eldritch horrors with hundreds of beans/proxies/servlets/God knows what, needless layers upon layers of abstractions and dangerous amounts of reflection and dynamic behavior, all to launch and initialize a web application in a "simple" manner. I've always seen the exact same horror, be it working with Spring Boot, Spring, JavaEE, Struts, or even something like Dropwizard (though it seemed a bit more sane). Only the microframeworks seemed decent in comparison, something like Vert.X (has a different paradigm, though), or Quarkus/Helidon.

But when it comes to running them... well, historically they were still a nightmare, if packaged with .war and relying on certain application servers/JDK versions being present. But packaging them as executable .jar files (think Spring Boot) makes them similarly easy to Go, at least as long as you have the JDK version that you need. You just drop the file in a folder and if you have some configuration (which your Go app would also need in one way or another), you can probably launch it.

> I have never had the sort of problems you say you're having trying to keep gems sorted.

Ruby suffers from the same problem that Python, Node, PHP and other non-statically compiled technologies suffer from - messing around with dependencies. If i develop on Ruby locally against version X.Y.Z, but only X.Y.W is available on the server due to Debian packaging older versions, then i'll run into problems because of the project refusing to build/run. I've also run into situations where building the native stuff (DB drivers in this case) will fail, for example, when libpq-fe.h headers were missing and pg couldn't been installed, so the gem native extension couldn't build. Also, on Windows, Ruby 2.7 downloaded the sqlite gem with 3 different trojans (Win64.Alien.eg, Win64.Alien.ef, Win32.Agent.xahigh) in the extensions (btreeinfo.dll, memstat.dll, memvfs.dll), as picked up by Kaspersky. No idea how that happened, or whether that could have been a false positive, but i didn't appreciate that much either.

That said, i have a folder that has about 112 images of all sorts of software breaking in various ways to date, and the number is only so low because i don't screenshot things on my work computer and not even every small instance of something breaking. In my experience, all of the technologies out there are bad in some ways, it's just about identifying and managing these tradeoffs towards whatever is suitable for your circumstances.

Well... Java developer here, 20+ years exp... yada yada yada.. I haven't deployed a war file in over a decade. No you do not NEED a specific kind of server, just like any programming language there are LOADs of options for deployment. Nowadays we have an NGINX + Docker container. Image just contains an executable JAR. Without docker it is not much different, you just have a Spring boot executable JAR. But even if you loathe Spring, you can build an executable JAR using a build in webserver (Tomcat, Jetty, what ever). For ruby, PHP and Python my guess is Docker is the solution as well. And if you are building applications daily with it you know the best ways of deployment. I think we should all stop bashing ANY programming language; they all have their key selling points. There is always someone willing to stand up against the bashing of their programming language their are working with. I do not program in Java exclusively; I use BASH, Groovy, Scala, TypeScript, JavaScript, as well. I get angry at Node sometimes at well but then I remember that I do not use it nearly as much as I do Java...and go to stackoverflow...

Just my 2 cents

> If i develop on Ruby locally against version X.Y.Z, but only X.Y.W is available on the server due to Debian packaging older versions

Either you use RVM locally to develop with Ruby X.Y.W or you install RVM on the server to use Ruby X.Y.Z there. Of course if the OS on the server is too old or too new there could be some versions of Ruby that won't work. It happened to me because of versions of openssl.

Have you not heard of docker?

Docker is amazing for deploying things on servers and i use it extensively - nowadays almost everything on my homelab is containerized since i no longer need to have that many separate VMs anymore...

That said, Docker is also oftentimes a poor option for local development, unless you're talking about external dependencies the app needs (e.g. MariaDB/PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis etc.), or maybe very specific setups that just won't be achievable otherwise (specific userland needed).

For example, when trying to run Ruby/PHP/Node/Python/Java apps in Docker containers, i've run into the following:

  - problems with file permissions
  - problems with file line endings
  - problems with Docker Desktop bind mounts (e.g. directory won't be mounted, path parsed incorrectly etc.)
  - problems with Docker Desktop bind mount performance
  - problems with networking (e.g. host.docker.internal sometimes refusing to route to non-containerized stuff on the host)
  - problems with run profiles (e.g. your IDE + Rails integration just won't work, at best you can just launch a different container/Compose stack with some other parameters)
  - problems with test runs and coverage (if you use the IDE integration, though that depends on the stack and how deeply your IDE is integrated, e.g. Java with IntelliJ IDEA)
  - problems with remote debugging, breakpoints, flame graphs etc. (most of those either don't work when the code is inside of a container, or need additional setup, e.g. remote debugging, where supported)

In my eyes, whenever possible, develop locally with the native runtimes for the IDE integration etc., use Docker for deployment or maybe QA/test environments as well - anything that will go on a server somewhere.

I find RVM much easier to manage than docker, for local development. To deploy on servers, it depends. Deploying with Capistrano to one server is easier than building a docker container and push / pull it. For cloud / serverless environments... the number of companies that really need that is surprisingly low. Most businesses are small and are well served by a single VPS.

What is complex about a real-world Java web-app ? Asking seriously.

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