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Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Rails anymore, but I did professionally for 3.5 years, so I think that gives me the right to a strong opinion on this, so here we go:

Why are they even bothering? Really, who cares about PATCH vs. PUT? If PATCH even has a remote chance of breaking 0.01% of sites, then WHY do it? PUT works fine. I don't care. I don't care either way, actually, since I don't use Rails anymore, just put PATCH in.

But my main concern is: Why is this major blog post worthy for Rails? I want to see something like "Rails 4: Damn Simple Websockets" or something to show that Rails is modernizing. I spent some time playing (read: nothing serious) with Lift and Scala, and while I wouldn't use that full time, it is clear to see that Lift has a handful of features that are just amazing for a modern website that Rails completely lacks (ridiculously simple AJAX/websocket stuff, triggering UI elements based on data model changes in the backend, etc.).

Anyways, its so early that Rails 4 is still a big unknown, but this is not the PR start I would've liked to see.

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This is a blog post in the Rails blog because obviously this has to be announced to the Rails community.

Any web framework has the duty to use and promote proper HTTP usage. Pushing PATCH over PUT we are doing that.

This change is not the entire Rails 4.0, it is only one change in Rails 4.0. Rails 4.0 has still a long way to go.

And of course, there are going to be practical improvements as there have been in all major (and indeed minor) versions. We will do practical improvements as well as being better HTTP citizens.

I'm glad to see this make it into 4. I'd love to see it get backported to 3.

Sorry can you explain how using PATCH for updates by default is better and promotes proper HTTP usage? I'm not REST expert but my understanding is that using PUT as a default wasn't RESTful largely because you can't guarantee or even rely on idempotency in the controller action and not just because sometimes people were only be submitting the partial state of the changed resource.

PATCH has the same idempotent requirement. It isn't simply some more generic version of PUT intended for generic CRUD updates. As I understand, it is a specific way to submit a "diff" of a resource to "patch" it so to speak.

PUT/PATCH verbs as far as HTTP/REST is concerned seem to have been designed with literal management of resource data/state in mind. The primary scenarios I can think of that require their use are things like blob storage APIs and perhaps other types of direct content management scenarios. It just doesn't seem appropriate as the general "update" mechanism that Rails is trying to make it out to be.

I'm not saying the Rails way of doing CRUD is bad. It's a handy abstraction and pattern that works fine for many, even most, cases, but as far s REST goes, Rails is really just RESTful theatre. From what I can tell the most RESTful thing Rails could do is just use POST by default everywhere and provide a convenient way for the developers to use PUT/PATCH where and when it truly makes sense.

How is sending partial state incompatible with idempotency?

Because browser support for any method but POST and GET still is spotty at best, your fears of breakage are totally irrelevant because rails still has to use the POST method and set some flag (_method in params) to cause the backend to interpret the POST as a different method.

The PATCH method thing only becomes relevant in conjunction with APIs where I would hope that you have enough control over your environment to not having to deal with broken proxies.

On the upside, using PATCH instead of PUT, in the context as PUT is used most often these days (partial updates) is more compliant with HTTP which says that the body of a PUT request should contain the whole resource, not just parts that change.

The problem is there is nothing in rails controller design that actually makes an update "restfully" idempotent. It's trivially easy to end up with a "updated" field that updates anyways, or other side effects, in which case neither PUT nor PATCH make sense.

In a good majority of API cases the correct method is POST, even for so-called updates. Because, generally speaking, it is the controller that decides what happens to state when processing the request in Rails and if and when there will be side effects. Unless you can be certain the client will decide 100% of the result of the state PUT and even PATCH are just not technically correct.

PATCH is arguably better suited than PUT here but again why the strict adherence to one or the other for updates, when quite possibly neither is correct. Why PATCH by default? Why not just POST by default, PATCH/PUT where they make sense? In the end there is nothing specifically RESTful about Rails, it has no real resources or hypermedia to speak of so I can understand why people would question the real value of this move.

How should the controller enforce idempotence though? That is a model concern.

"Why are they even bothering? Really, who cares about PATCH vs. PUT?"

Lots of people care. It's about following existing standards to allow for more predictable behavior. What if people didn't care about status code 200 vs 404?

And if you don't care... what's with the rant?

So, I'm reading a lot of reasoning, but not many good reasons yet. Can anyone follow through on why PATCH vs PUT is better?

Assume I'm stupid.

Explain to me, but don't stop at "because it's more compliant to the HTTP Standard" / "because thus it has been written in the scriptures" mustn't be the fundamental reason to do something.

Similarly, "it is Good to be compliant with the HTTP Standards in this case, because in other cases it was Good also"--certainly I can understand that being compliant with the 200 and 404 status code is a Good Thing.

But is there any other, tangible reason why a Rails project would benefit from now using PATCH instead of PUT? Some interoperability with another existing framework maybe? Or interoperability with a hypothetical future framework? What other kinds of software would need to be changed and used before it'll provide a tangible benefit to a Rails project that uses PATCH vs a Rails project using PUT?

BTW I'm not arguing against standards (I know, I said you may assume I'm stupid, but no need to go all out ok?), I'm just genuinely curious if there is any other benefit, real, future, hypothetical or imaginary, other than "it's more compliant, and being compliant is good".

Actually even if that is the only reason, that's nice, it makes things neater and that's also good. But it would be kind of thin.

They're different things, just like eating and drinking are different things. I don't really know what Rails is doing with them, but it's a really simple reason at the HTTP scope.

PUT is A) idempotent (meaning that repeated operations have the same result), and B) always replaces the entire resource (and by implication should contain the entire new resource).

PATCH is A) not idempotent (meaning that repeated invocations could have different results), and B) affects part or all of the resource.

So, an immediately obvious benefit[1] is that PATCH requests are potentially much lighter-weight.

[1] Aside from conceptual clarity which I frankly cannot fathom reasons for arguing against, yet many do…

We can all agree that Rails has stalled for the past couple of years because of refactoring. Question is, would Rails really have much more to show if new features were crammed onto the 2.0 architecture?

It seems like the post is intended to highlight a high quality commit which somebody worked hard on, as well as prepare the community for a semantic change. It may not be worth touting as much as a competitive feature, but it certainly deserves it's place in the feed.

But really, the only thing that bothers me with this post is the under-developed blog it's been running on for years (ie.: no simple way to get to archives, next or previous post, etc).

Advocating against PATCH is near to advocating against the introduction of RESTful routes and controllers, which was a crucial gain for Rails (even though they probably got the hint from Django?).

P.s.: Socket.io isn't part of Node.js core either. There are implementations in Ruby, but why not just use Node and Socket where appropriate?

I thought i was the only one who see this. Why haven't the blog been updated to something much more useful?

It does matter. The more you build on predictable standards in one place the simpler things get in others.

Out of interest, what do you use now instead of Rails?

If PATCH even has a remote chance of breaking 0.01% of sites, then WHY do it? PUT works fine. I don't care.

Well, this "if it even remotely breaks 0.01%" and "I don't care" attitude is the main reason things get bloated and stop progressing.

We seem to have different ideas of progress. To my eye Rails is picking up bloat like there's no tomorrow and happily adopting questionable decisions like the above. Meanwhile fundamental issues remain largely unaddressed.

There's still serious performance regressions.

The asset pipeline is still sort of a trainwreck.

There's still no automation for schema migrations (perhaps hobo fields will finally bring some relief for those who adopt it).

They still don't seem to have realized that code generators are a no-go.

I see zero efforts towards modernizing the bloated routing and MVC cruft to accomodate modern fat-clients (and imho the "resources"-magic was a terrible idea from the start even for regular apps).

The whole thing is still riddled with ungodly amounts of magic that likes to break in unpredictable ways (my pet bug: the monkey-patch to really suppress browser stack-traces in production changes about every 3 months and it's worrying such a bug was deliberately created in first place).

I could go on for a while... </rant>

Patches welcome!

I think the problem is beyond being solvable by patches, but an issue of philosophical introspection of where Rails wants to be in a few years.

To be able to change the direction of Rails on this issue and the other issues the poster above raised, I'd have to spend a significant amount of time submitting patches and get to the point where I am a major committer to have the opportunity to chime in and have a significant impact on the direction Rails is going. Even if I or someone else with the same concerns were committed to making that effort, by the time I or they get to the point where we can have an impact, it will be too late.

I'd rather commit to a node or an npm package than rails because any package I commit to will hopefully be replaced by something better once it's outlived its usefulness. My favorite part about node is that it isn't opinionated. It leaves the opinion to the community modules. Hopefully most community modules with maintain just the right amount of opinion about their domain and know when to concede matters of opinion to other modules that node better. It's nice when separation of concerns is a cultural value.

This isn't a node/rails debate. It's a values debate. I think opinion was the right value for the right time several years ago. We're going through a time of change where opinion is a liability not an asset.

Does this mean it's time to fork?

This is a horrible issue with modern development. Basically we are getting into sectarianism. Don't like a doctrine of the Brethren Church? Fork and become the Grace Brethren. Don't like a small doctrine of the Grace Brethren? Fork and make the Conservative Grace Brethren.

I know that GIT and the like have made it really easy to fork and run, but does this fundamentally help? Does having X versions of some framework really make sense?

Why not go a different route and just give up the one side and make another? Rather than forking, make something new.

Yeah, I actually think that's the way to go if you don't like Rails, I was kind of joking. I am curious to see if there's enough passion for Rails itself that people would say, "no I want RAILS, even if it means making it something else" rather than just accepting a change in philosophy or moving to something else.

Personally, I think there's not. I think people either are sticking to Rails or they are not. I think even if you don't like the new Rails, it did help the development community at large. Before Rails, I don't know many web folks who were talking about TDD and MVC and real, honest, programming stuff.

> I know that GIT and the like have made it really easy to fork and run, but does this fundamentally help?

Yes, it does. What ends up happening in practice is that forks are almost always short-lived. They either get merged with the mainline, they become the new mainline, or they die out. Occasionally, there are two self-sustaining projects that diverge from the same point of origin, but it's rare.

Naw, if you work with Ruby, I'd just work on creating an ecosystem of interchangeable parts around Sinatra.

"My favorite part about node is that it isn't opinionated. It leaves the opinion to the community modules."

Node is not opinionated because it is not a framework; it is a JavaScript environment built on V8 and some common libraries. It would be much more appropriate to compare Express* with Rails than Node with Rails.

If you want to compare Node with something you'd be more correct comparing Node and its modules with Ruby and its gems.

* Even though, from what I can see, Express has more in common with Sinatra than Rails...

Express is more like Sinatra. It's largely syntactic sugar and some powerful extra features beyond what node's http module offers.

Express knows where its "opinion" ends and where it should make room for other modules with opinions of their own.

There really are two opinions at play here. Opinions of how to do something and opinions of what to do.

Express has opinions of how that differ from the http module (it even uses the http module to accomplish what it does).

Express has a minor opinion on what it should be doing and extends the what beyond the http module, but that's largely where it ends.

The problem with Rails is that it the domain of subjects it had an opinion on kept growing until it couldn't not have an opinion on stuff.

CSS versus SASS? I love Sass and used it before Rails added it. Rails didn't need to have an opinion here. Coffeescript? Same thing.

Maybe it is an unfair comparison because there's no equivalent to this much opinion about so many things in the Javascript world, except some Rails ports that people have made. And even they are seen by most as "Oh that's nice that you can get set up quickly in less than a day, but no thanks, I'd like to pick and choose what makes sense to me based on what I'm planning on building."

Had we known better maybe we would have gone with Sinatra back when we started.

Fair points.

Given what you've described I'd suggest you take just one more friendly unbiased look at Rails 3... and if after that it's still not your cup of tea then fair is fair. Maybe you won't choose to develop with it, but maybe you also won't choose bash it. It's pretty cool and I believe it was an attempt by Rails developers to address your very concerns. Most major components can now be easily swapped via Railties thanks to the decoupling efforts.

http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Railtie.html

Don't get me wrong. I really like Ruby, but I think Rails has become too all encompassing in places.

The architecture, like railties look pretty cool, but policy of constantly embrace and extend just leads to bloat that gets in the way when you're doing something more exotic than straight server-side CRUD.

"It's a values debate. I think opinion was the right value for the right time several years ago. We're going through a time of change where opinion is a liability not an asset."

I think this may be becoming more true everyday, but I still don't think we've come to the point where anyone has discovered The Way to do web stuff. Rails continues to introduce ideas that are interesting and important. Would CoffeeScript and Sass have received such rapid uptake if not for Rails? (Some of you may think that would be a good thing)

Both coffee script and sass were already were receiving massive uptake before they were included in Rails.

TDD as a cultural norm was Rails' biggest contribution. That was a good thing and was an opinion that few developers with argue with.

It's unfortunate that this being down voted. Because he means it sincerely.

The "If you're not happy submit a patch or shut up" is exactly the arrogant and absurd attitude that kills open source projects.

No, "I'm not happy and it's your job to fix it" is exactly the arrogant and absurd attitude that kills open source projects.

Downvoted you both. Both attitudes are neither arrogant nor absurd. They just stem from different expectations and beliefs. These kind of statements aren't going to convince anyone. Explain why they are wrong. 'Being arrogant' is not an explanation: it's an accusation, that'll immediately get the other on the defensive.

If you really need an explanation for why slavery is wrong, I think you're beyond reasoning with.

I don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting one side of the above argument implicitly condones slavery? Or do you feel that my argument is invalid, because it could equally apply to a discussion about slavery in which people resort to name calling?

Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. Nobody needs to be told that demanding unpaid labor of open-source contributors is condoning slavery, and nobody is owed an explanation of why unless they're a small child or mentally handicapped.

Huh? The time I've invested in open-source contributions has had payoffs massively greater than any work I've ever done for a paycheck. It's just not necessarily that I get paid for the work, rather, I get paid because of the work.

Maybe your experience with open-source is different. I think most contributors do it for joy, anyway.

Has the entire population of HN suddenly lost the ability to comprehend English?

Demanding unpaid labour has nothing to do with you or anyone else volunteering labour. My words cannot possibly be construed as saying volunteer work in open source is slavery.

Even the top ranked essay on exploitation of the free software industry[1] disagrees with you:

"I do not believe that engineers creating software for other engineers results in exploitation."

Squeaky wheel driven development is not slavery. Users are "free" to demand features, and developers are "free" to ignore the requests. Your premise is absurd.

1. http://www.bearcave.com/software/btp/freesoft.html

You have utterly lost the context of the thread, which was an insufferable fool whining about developers welcoming patches instead of doing whatever is demanded of them.

Eta_carinae did not demand that open source authors fix any problem a user complains about. He only stated that the exact opposite attitude is not a good idea. Arguing against A is not the same as arguing in favor of (not A), because there are more than 2 possible positions on the issue.

Similarly, cheald does not demand that users of open source projects contribute fixes for bugs. He also only stated that the exact opposite attitude is not a good idea.

Arguing either of those extremes is pointless: the discussion starts polarized and neither side will yield an inch. Introducing slavery into the discussion doesn't help.

Most authors of open source projects are interested in having their projects be used by many others. It is the usefulness to many others that provides a sense of accomplishment. If they don't pay some attention to problems those others encounter and for instance fix clear bugs in early releases, their chances of achieving that goal are lower. Observing this fact about the system is not argument in favor of slavery. There are no normative statements involved.

Similarly, if you, as a user of an open source project, want some bug fixed, the best way to go about it is often to write the code yourself and offer it for inclusion. That suggestion does not reduce them to slaves either.

To make a bazaar work, all parties involved have to be flexible in their expectations.

The question is whether the patches would be accepted. There are still people in charge. When they make a choice to go route A and you say: I have a great patch to make route B work, they are not going to take it. Secondly, if you disagree with an architectural decision, you can't be expected to make the chosen architecture work. Especially not if your patch may be rejected anyway.

The number of patches that get rejected is staggering. Practice shows that 'patches welcome' is just not true.

re: asset pipeline

It's beyond me why rails thinks it should dictate how to write/manage/package javascript.

As a newbie-ish javascript developer I am continually learning from great projects like requirejs, enderjs, nodejs, commonjs (AMD in general), backbonejs, etc.

How arrogant do rails programmers have to be to dip their hand into javascript best practices? Honest question, because the better I get at programming the more I feel like rails is less necessary.

They're not dictating how you use JS, best practices, or anything like that, it's simply a pipeline for compressing and delivering assets. You also don't have to use it if you don't want to. There is a "config.assets.enabled" option in application.rb that you can set to "false" to turn it off.

Bottom line is Rails is, and always has been, and opinionated framework, which you choose to buy in to. And even in recent years they've been better about letting you opt out of certain parts of it.

Why is this being down voted? It's true.

How do you minify and concatenate your files in your projects? Part of a deploy/build script? Commit hooks? Manually? Do you do it at all? What about compiling Sass and CoffeeScript?

The asset pipeline is not arrogance it's convenience. If you have a better system for those tasks then you shouldn't use the pipeline, but for a lot of people the asset pipeline saves time and results in a faster, better experience for their end users.

+1. I've watched people reinvent the asset pipeline on top of the asset pipeline.

Completely agree. However, instead of bundling one asset pipeline into rails that is "aggressive" like Sprockets about getting into everything, they should have said "here's a connector" where you can attach the "asset pipeline" of your choice and let the community create the tools it needs for different scenarios, such as one asset pipeline for thin clients and another for think clients. Or separate asset pipelines for sass/css and coffeescript/javascript.

Bundling a default that doesn't play well with lots of the client-side innovations hurts rails more than helps.

The asset pipeline as it is currently designed is monolithic and an all or nothing approach.

I got downvoted into oblivion (deservedly so) because of my snark. But this is essentially the point I was trying to make. Rails is good at ruby. It was never good at javascript. Remember rjs? Remember inlining ajax handlers? Now we have default coffee script and sass file _per_ view. I know they mean well but javascript is its own beast! I really don't want to have to consciously disable all these things that are supposed to "be convenient" just because I know my way around javascript enough to not co-mangle it in with ruby.

I agree, however Patch versus Put is the least of Rails' problem when it comes to bloat. Put vs Patch is bikeshedding.

An insistence on handling all things with Ruby is why things get bloated and stop progressing.

Sprockets solves a pain, I admit, but at the cost of adding ruby bloat to all thick client code.

Instead of being able to use javascript libraries with one another natively, everything goes through Ruby.

Anyways, I'll probably get downvoted for this comment by Railers because this is somewhat OT and trollish (I admit), but it's a legitimately complaint about the direction of Rails.

I think Rails has lost sight of what it does really well, server-side logic. Rails, in v4.0, needs to adopt a symbiotic relationship with thick-client javascript instead of trying to consume it and insert ruby in-between all the javascript parts.

For example, right now, the recommended place for a backbone.js app in a rails project is /app/assets/javascripts/. That "folder" is only going to grow as the client-side javascript becomes more important. Keeping the javascript logic "subordinate" to the Ruby elements in a Rails project causes more bloat than anything else. Look at any thick-client Rails project and count the number of gems managing javascript. If there are more than two or three, you've probably got a separation of concerns issue at the language level. That's bloat.

If you want to down vote me, go ahead. I just ask that you have the courtesy to defend your down vote with a comment. If you think I'm wrong tell me why. Maybe, I'm doing something wrong.

"Keeping the javascript logic "subordinate" to the Ruby elements in a Rails project causes more bloat than anything else. "

I have no idea what this means. how is it subordinate? The location on the filesystem?

"Look at any thick-client Rails project and count the number of gems managing javascript"

I've made a few that have no gems managing javascript. They talk to rails via REST. Rails doesn't need to care about them, and they don't need to care about rails.

By subordinate, I mean having your javascript assets managed by sprockets.

If you can tell me how I can get 100% of my javascript assets managed by javascript code and still allow the use of rspec for end to end acceptance testing, I'm all ears. How do you get Rails, at one point of contact, to had off all asset recompilation, concatenation, minification, cache busting through md5 fingerprint hashing, etc. to javascript, I'm all ears.

I wanted to use require.js before. Spent a couple days working it into the project, but couldn't get it to work because of incompatibilities with sprockets. Undid everything. Someone made a require.js rails plugin, and I tried it again. It turned out to be incompatible with how the jasmine gem works and the jasmine gem is organized the way it is because that's how gems are supposed to be organized. Again, after wasting several days trying trying to get everything to work, I tore it all out again.

It's like whoever designed sprockets hasn't even considered the possibility that maybe it should permit javascript to be used freely with javascript within a Rails projects without intermediating. Near as I can tell, all the intermediation is done to be able to such things as maintaining all the files in the same directory organization (app, config, lib, vendor).

I'd split things down into something like this to cleanly separate the concerns of ruby and javascript: /client/ --/app/ --/config/ --/lib/ --/vendor/ --/spec/ /server/ --/app/ --/config/ --/lib/ --/vendor/ --/spec/ /shared/ --/stylesheets/ (if you render both static and dynamic. otherwise put this in the appropriate directory above) --/config/ --/spec/acceptance/

How do you keep all your ruby out of your javascript?

It seems to me that your complaint is that Rails isn't written in javascript. If I'm understanding correctly, you want javascript on the backend. That's fine, but it's not really a critique of rails.

p.s. you don't have to use sprockets if it doesn't fit your needs. Your javascript can live outside of your rails app.

> Instead of being able to use javascript libraries with one another natively, everything goes through Ruby.

You can still do that, you can turn the asset pipeline off and just throw everything in /public like normal if you want.

Re: "through Ruby." If you meant that the body of the CSS file is generated for a request by running through the ruby interpreter, that's not true.

Thick javascript clients should probably live in a different project anyway. Create a rails project with the serverside stuff, a rest service layer. And another project containing just the clientside code, no ruby at all.

Then how do you test it if it's in another project? If you want to start stubbing out server logic in client tests and vice versa on the other side that seems very cumbersome and brittle.

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