Ruby on Rails is getting popular
With a number of hosting companies adding Ruby on Rails to their list of supported technologies, Ruby is getting wildly popular for small and medium size projects. Easiness of deployment, low resource consumption, friendliness to shared environments, compatibility with agile methods of development makes Ruby on Rails an interesting alternative to other web technologies.
That has not happened to Java. Being the most popular technology for large size, enterprise applications, Java couldn’t make its way to the masses. Java hosting is still quite expensive, troublesome in shared environments, harder to administrate. While PHP remains the most popular technology among web application developers, especially for small projects.
John said,
October 6, 2008 at 11:00 am
Hi,
While for sure Ruby on Rails was gaining momentum a couple of years ago, obviously a lot of people started to figure out the truth. There is no major advantage for using Ruby on Rails and there are a lot of issues that people who already started using RoR don’t want to talk about:
- Ruby is a different language, and it is much more complicated than Java
- Ruby is faster to write only considering that Java requires more boilerplate code, however most of this code is currently automatically generated by the IDEs, so there is not too much time lost writing it
- Ruby is dynamically typed, and that means that if you really want to figure out what type oa variable is just by looking at the code it is not possible, while in C#, Java etc this is a breeze. This makes the maintainance much more expensive in Ruby (or any other scripting technology) than in Java
- Ruby is f**** slow. A lot of people try to emphasize that this is not an issue. How come this is not an issue??? Even php is faster, this is really bad
- There are severe issues with the scalability
- Web development is about details. The details implementation (and I am not talking just about cosmetic details) consistently take pretty much the same amoutn of time in any web technology.
The conclusion: if you already know java, asp.net, php, you are on the right track. If you don’t know, please try to look around BEFORE making RoR the ONLY technology you know, as it might be difficult for you to find a job. Please see the Ruby on Rails Rant written by Zed Shaw in which he claims that his carreer had a lot to suffer after he put too much time in the development for his project, Mongrel.
Ok, it is possible that for Java you need your own server. The Java hosting services suck big time. Basically either you have your own server, or you have problems. HOWEVER for asp.net for example this is not true, and gives you the power of Java in a (cheap) hosted environment.
There really isn’t a reason these days to think too much about learning Ruby…
John
David H. Wilkins said,
October 6, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Wow – that last comment came out of nowhere. That’s the kind of comment I’d expect to see in Rails infancy, not at its current level of maturity.
It’s easy to find specific examples of places where RoR has fallen. That’s the case with any framework in the hands of newcomers, or projects that have been more successful than the architects envisioned.
IMHO, The original post still resonates today. RoR is a significant player on the Web frameworks playing field. Ruby is an easy language to pick up, and helps to expand your programming mind.
Scalability is a design problem, not a framework problem. Yes, Ruby is slower than other languages, but provides significant value-add with it’s expressiveness and readability. Perl and PHP have the expressiveness, but not the readability.
Deploying large scale RoR apps is not something to be done on a $7.95/mo hosted account. That takes real thought and architecture – the same as .NET or Java.
I’d be willing to place a similarly experienced RoR team against a team using *any* other platform. The RoR code will be smaller, better designed, and more adherent to web standards (and it will be done faster, too).