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Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months

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55 pointsmoorage27 comments

I thought it only takes a few days to write a web app in Rails (minutes actually). OK, humor aside - I am coming from Java and trying to pick up Rails, and I have to say, I am really not that enchanted. Many things in Rails just seem extremely ugly when you are used to the clean Java code. Passing everything around in Hashes does not seem elegant to me, and I wonder how Code completion is supposed to work with that. Maybe if you know the whole Rails by heart, it is OK and you don't need completions, but I am lazy. Java is not that ugly - it might look like a lot of typing, but actually most of it is done by Code completion/Code generation these days. Spring also offers quite a few "Code by Convention" features, so it is not that much harder than Rails.

For example with Java annotations, I only have to press ctrl+space in Eclipse above a variable in a model, and it gives me the options for mapping all sorts of things with hibernate (ie many to many etc). Much nicer than looking things up in a book. Presumably it would be possible to set up the Dev Environment to be able to offer completions in the rails migrations, but that would be a hack - in Java, it follows from the types... Oh and btw, isn't it ugly to have the model code distributed all over the place (migrations, model, database schema)? I'd rather have it all in one place.

Internationalization seemed very fishy in Rails, too, from what I gather from "Agile Rails".

Anyway, sorry for the rant - I really have to force myself to complete at least one Rails application, but my expectations are rather low. At least perhaps I can appreciate Java again afterwards...

I like Ruby, but the reality is probably that in a typical Web Application, it's features don't come into play that often. It's mostly CRUD, after all...

Tichy, Hibernate is aweful.

Ruby is just PHP 2.0, or at least it seems that the same crowd that sweared by PHP few years ago, are attracted to it and "have seen the light". Every beginner is a "Rails" expert now. Same people, same crap will come out.

I have a different take on Rails. It's actually something that has attracted a lot of interest from Java people sick of writing too much code, as well as scripting language people who want something that's relatively clean, that basically utilizes a lot of best practices in one bundle.

I like it a lot, and do not consider myself one of the "crap producing PHP crowd".

Also, how can you equate Ruby to PHP? They're very different in terms of philosophy and design. Ruby has all kinds of nice language features that make it a pleasure to use. PHP basically borrows things from here and there, and was never a very "inspired" programming language.

In general, people like to do things faster to achieve the result ASAP. Most people have a short patience level.

Why do you thing startup is using Rails? because they want to get rich fast by throwing their simple products faster.

People can't wait for 8 months to see their work comes to fruition.

Basically it's human nature to like Ruby on Rails, not because of the technical merit.

Given what we know about program length vs bugs (it's pretty linear), I think it's a "technical merit" that Rails lets you write shorter, clearer code. In an environment where you're not sure what you're doing is going to go anywhere, and where you need to be able to turn on a dime, shorter, clearer code is also going to be an advantage.

Why don't you like Hibernate? It has never let me down so far, and I am positive that it is way superior to ActiveRecords. At least it also handles lots of special cases that are not implemented in AR. I also like the HSQL syntax.

It is very bloated. Typical Java style. Too much XML (or anotattions), lots of "magic" happening, without you knowing what's going on. For complicated joins, you are much better off with just SQL (maybe using some utilities like Jakarta's DButil).

Hibernate is just another complexity with a steep curve, and it's propertary stuff to learn (HQL ?).

If you must do a ORM, I like Apache's Cayenne. It comes with a very nice utility, which creates everything for you. Much simpler than Hibernate.

Overrall I'd rather not use java. Python seems a much better fit for web development, thou it's most popular framework, Django, suffers a lot of the same stuff as Rails.

And Ruby is an ugly language. Too perl-ish.

No way you would create a join with pure SQL, filling all the objects fields by hand is just too much pain. I found HQL very intuitive to use, it is almost exactly like SQL, only with a few shortcuts. The learning curve was not so steep either.

Hibernate does one thing, and does it well. With the annotations, it has improved even more. What parts of it do you consider magic? Magic is not necessarily a bad thing - I like the magic of higher level programming languages that shield me from the gory details of assembly language. I just don't like it if code is not readable anymore without knowing the magic.

I will look into Cayenne on occasion. Hibernate is the industry standard now, though, and for a good reason in my opinon.

I would like to move to a more dynamic language, though...

Maybe using GORMS (the ORM from Grails, based on Hibernate) standalone in a Java project would be nice.

>And Ruby is an ugly language. Too perl-ish.

Definately a taste thing, but I would agree (having done a bit of both over the last year). Ruby OO is nice, but then OO is often the cause of problems for me (python makes quasi functional styles easy).

People don't really use XML with hibernate (and haven't for some years from what I see). Hibernate does try to cater for every corner case though (perhaps the cause of the "bloat"). But its the 80/20 rule again - most people only want 20% of the features, the problem is that every one wants a different 20% (hence you get subjective bloat).

> Ruby is just PHP 2.0, or at least it seems that the same crowd that sweared by PHP few years ago, are attracted to it and "have seen the light".

Ruby is PHP 2.0? Have you spent any time with Ruby, or have you only looked at Rails, one of several Ruby Web frameworks?

I suspect few ex-PHPers are doing straight-up Ruby coding.

Del.icio.us are rewriting in PHP with the Symfony framework:

http://www.symfony-project.com/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-pre...

Why would they choose that??

I think the crap producing PHP crowd the peeps are referring to are those developers who use plain jane php with their webpages (logic mixed with presentation). Believe me I was one of those guys and I hated myself for it. Now there are real serious PHP frameworks out there that do a very nice job of MVC (obviously due to the popularity of RoR). Symfony, Code Igniter, CakePHP(to some extent) just to name a few. So don't worry there is still hope for PHP yet.

Well, give it a try. Again - a tool is just a tool and it has to fit the hand of the person using it. If Java is your thing, Java is your thing... but there is a lot to love in Rails.

Give it a shot for your own edification - a lot of making a rails app is the command line: install ... The lightweight plugins are just beautiful, and they would only be possible with Ruby or a language like it. It really makes your code a joy to create, maintain, and update.

I am determined to write at least one Rails application. Obviously there must be something to it, otherwise it would not have so many fans. I just wrote that rant because I was kind of frustrated with Rails - sometimes aesthetic issues are hampering my productivity. I would be curious how many excellent Java developers have switched to Rails happily. Your example doesn't convince me very much, because of the GWT ingredient. I haven't used it, but the concept sounds very weird (compile Java to JavaScript), so I am not surprised that you gave up on it.

There should be a clear distinction between Java web development (JSP), and GWT. I think this creates confusion with some. GWT compiles restricted Java code to native Javascript. From an implementation perspective, it is not similar to JSP or JSF at all. When talking about "using Java", one should distinguish if they are talking about GWT because it is totally different.

I agree with the reasons mentioned for not using GWT, with the exception of the loading process (this is no longer used in GWT 1.4) and the CSS/HTML argument. You could code your entire site in HTML/CSS if you wanted to, wrapping your HTML in HTMLPanels.

That being said, I am not surprised that someone would switch from GWT to RoR. It really depends on what you need. I think for most applications, GWT is simply overkill. Sometimes people dont need to utilize RPC's or client side processing. Rails is so fast and elegant and you can reach desirable results quickly. And lots of people are simply tired of looking at Java syntax from their day jobs (I think this partly fuels the Java-hate).

But I would argue that there are times when RoR is not the best choice. The application I'm working on would not be possible for me to build in RoR (realistically). It could be, but I would have to write entire RPC and event listener frameworks to handle the level of complexity required for the asynchronous components. I need bullet-proof debugging, a native Ajax environment, low-level server back-end control, and high-level RPC abstraction right out of the box. We'd like to internationalize this stuff too, and directly integrate iPhone support (loaded via user-defined properties). It is for this type of stuff that GWT is my tool of choice. Sometimes complicated tasks require leveraging tools a bit more complicated to get the job done...

Thanks for posting this! It's the sort of informative topic that probably won't generate a lot of commentary (as opposed to the the controversial type that does). But don't interpret quiet as a lack of interest - this is one of the reasons I scan hacker news.

Actually, I'm looking for a more comprehensive way way to do authentication in Rails (that doesn't require as much manual intervention as I had to do last time), and this article definitely helped out.

2nd the motion. Thank you!

I see you moved away from Java. Have you guys tried JBoss Seam (http://www.jboss.com/products/seam)? If not I strongly suggest you give it a try. If you love RoR I'm almost sure you'd appreciate JBoss Seam.

I really want to try that, especially since they also support Groovy, if I remember correctly.

On the other hand, what puts me off is that it seems to require an application container. I wonder if that would have been the case if it had not been developed by employees of JBoss... So far I was very happy with Tomcat, and I am reluctant to move to a full-fledged application server.

It works in tomcat just fine (I hear). Apparently they have examples that show it deploying to it. And other ones as well. Yeah I heart the groovy thing as well. Ruby maybe forthcoming, problem is ruby doesn't have the same sort of java like annotations that groovy has (and seam expects).

Great write-up of your experience! It's particularly interesting that you moved away from Java/GWT to RoR. Did you find handrolling your own javascript (+ frameworks) to be just as productive as the Java/GWT approach? (My RoR app has most of the funky javascript GUI after authorization, so it's not indexable anyway.)

Some other questions:

- When do you plan on releasing your git bundle for TextMate? :)

- Has there been any gotchas when using Joyent's Sun platform?

- Did you consider using extjs? (http://extjs.com/tutorial/using-ext-grid-ruby-rails)

Thanks again for posting.

No gotcha's with Joyent so far. I've been using Solaris for a couple years so Matt leaves the sys admin stuff to me. We also use webmin which makes things much much easier.

The git bundle is pretty basic (add, commit, pull, and push) if you are interested in it shoot me an email and I will send it to you.

Hey - I'll let my co-founder dan talk to you about git + joyent.

As for javascript - javascript is actually a decent language IMHO, the debugging just SUCKS. And the libraries are quite young.

I hadn't seen extjs, but maybe I'm alone when I prefer old fashion ULs & LIs for lists and grids and so on. I haven't seen anything that a framework does that betters this. However, I'll look more into extjs. Thanks for the tip!

Isn't this quite a big risk? Creating an entire application without knowing the platform requires quite some confidence that it is going to deliver and live up to the hype. I'm glad it worked out for them, but I know my company won't start a new project with Rails because we don't have much knowledge about it. Scaling, especially, seems to be a challenge sometimes (cf Twitter and the related controversy).

1) You will never do anything new if you take that attitude. Anything new inherently requires risk. If you do nothing new, you fail.

2) Scaling is a problem for Twitter because it has to scale to such an absolutely massive scale. Saying that you won't choose Rails because Twitter has scaling problems with it is a stupid argument unless you are reasonably sure that you're going to be building an application that will get Twitter-like traffic. No matter what language/framework you choose, if you get the kind of traffic that Twitter does, you will have problems.

well, it's one thing to take risks, it's completely different to write a production application in a language and framework you barely know. you end up spending a lot of time looking up things that you already knew how to do in the other languages you were familiar with. also, what happens if the application goes down for unknown reasons and you have to troubleshoot the application at 3am on Sunday? It's sometimes wise to stick to the things you have mastered and learn new technologies on non-critical applications.

You're right, it was a risk - but a calculated one. We heard a lot of good things, and decided to try it out for two weeks. At the end of the two week period, we loved it. From the syntactic sugar to the ease of caching, to everything else.

You rarely have to reinvent the wheel with RoR, which is a wonderful experience.

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