Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

The title will get votes, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of content in it. "Rails won". OK, why? What's good about it?

I wish the author at least postulated some reasons why Rails became popular:

* It launched before the other web frameworks of its nature (in fact, many were inspired by it).

* It hit API stability many years before Django did.

* It's a lot more flexible than most PHP frameworks.

* Ruby makes pretty, domain-specific languages easy.

* Rails, while allowing you to override defaults, doesn't ask you if you don't care.

* The features have kept coming in Rails with regular releases increasing its value. Many of the additions have come from real-world, high-value projects. That can't be said for many frameworks which were built as "we can make Rails in (Java|PHP|Python|etc.)".

Rails has hit a tipping point, but the interesting question is why. The author hasn't put anything forward there. In fact, the author has some downright weird statements. He can't find anything bad to say about Django? Rails just plain sucks? Yet Rails wins? Even some of the things he mentions - such as coupling data objects to the database - are done in Django (and most of these style frameworks) in a similar fashion. So, that sucks in Rails and doesn't in Django. Hmm.

It's a great attempt to create one of those articles people love to read that say, "this sucks, but it's still what you should be doing because it doesn't matter that it sucks".

I've read Michal's blog for a long time. I used to host with him (in fact I think I still owe him about $60). One thing he is not is a windy tech evangelist. He writes about his experiences small and large. He's a interesting entrepreneur. I think something that's lost in your analysis is his resignation to building with an off the shelf framework. A better title would be "Rails and Django won and also I've given up on writing a better framework".

I agree the article lacks back story and deep analysis (probably making it unsuitable for an HN link), but if you were familiar with his blog that would be unnecessary as the sentiment and not the technical reasons are important.

I think the article reads much differently if you picture the author saying, "Rails won in this particular instance, for me/us." Perhaps that is not what the author intended, but that is how I read it. It's much less polarizing that way.

I do agree that it lacks substance.

I don't agree that it lacks substance, the conclusion, and also the conclusion that I have made according to rails is that it's "good enough" for almost any web project. It's safe to have it as a default choice. There's a good community, fantastic libraries, constant innovation, and people are really happy developing with it.

The notion that there's nothing wrong in choosing rails -- is now acceptable mainstream. Even the hard ass Java developers at my work can acknowedge that yes, it speeds up development to use a field tested full-stack framework instead of rolling your own framework for every project. (Only recently did we come to a truce, and now I can refrain for a while to try to push even wackier frameworks on them like some Clojure based ones, because Rails is good enough for me )

For the record, you're preaching to the choir. I'm a Ruby/Rails developer, and I'm quite happy about it.

I was only intending to comment that titling an article "Rails won" without qualification, or without clearly making a decisive argument, lacks substance, in my opinion. It's an anecdotal piece with which I sympathize, but that perhaps would have been better titled "Rails won again", which would elicit thoughts of Rails being chosen over other frameworks (and CMSs, in this case) in a particular project, as opposed to Rails winning some epic arms race.

I probably just should've kept the last line of that last comment to myself. :-)

That's exactly what the author is not saying. The other frameworks were better for them, he says. They didn't like Rails.

But Rails has the most industry and community support. And since nobody plans to write all the code themselves, that matters more than almost anything else.

"It launched before the other web frameworks of its nature (in fact, many were inspired by it)."

It launched at the same time as Nitro, which was similar in some ways, but possible better in others. Nitro was thread safe, faster, had an early form of migrations before Rails, and offered a more capable view/action pipeline model (somewhat akin to Rack middleware).

It allowed for a fast convention-over-configuration rapid development approach, but also made PHP/ASP-style Just One File apps equally easy.

Yet Rails became all the rage and Nitro the forgotten child. My guess is the marketing of Rails beat the pants off everyone else.

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