So I’m starting to learn something about Ruby on Rails. I’m not actually doing anything at the moment, as I have a tight deadline looming and very little time for playing, but I ordered the “Programming Ruby” and the “Agile Web Development with Rails” books from The Pragmatic Programmer bookshelf.
Meanwhile, I’m keeping my eyes open, reading blogs and lurking on the mailing list. From blogs I caught these two snippets in the last days:
Berin: “Ruby and Rails both have a wonderful programming environment. It is fun to create using the language. However, where it does fail is when you have to deploy on the server side. I could run it as a CGI script, but it is slow. I could use FCGI, but integration with Apache2 is shaky at best and I get unexplained errors between development and production environments. I can’t seem to use mod_ruby, and no amount of searching, asking, or whining seems to get me the help I need. This is the greatest hurdle to Ruby on the server. It is reasonable to believe that the Ruby community can make this happen. I mean what happens when you can’t use LigHTTPd and FastCGI? There just needs to be more people helping out.”
Andrew: “Then I lost a day and a night to the joys of Ruby on Rails on Debian. Ready for prime time? Not without a LOT of pain. This is one framework that needs to grow up before I’d recommend it for general use; you need to be a genius sysadmin and no more than one step removed from divinity to have any hope of getting it to behave on a production server. More on that later, just as soon as I can write about it without letting out blood-curdling howls of anger and pain.”
I’ve also been following the mailing list thread regarding internationalization support in Rails, which seems to be not quite there yet. There are solutions, but apparently none very complete and stable.
So, Rails might not be as enterprise-ready as Java, but I’m not really worried about this. It’s a young framework that hasn’t released its 1.0 version yet. Do you remember what Java was at version 1.0? I remember starting to learn and like Java even before 1.0 came out and this investment surely paid off in the end.
Moreover, as I wrote above, it’s going to be some time before I think about developing some serious apps with it. This will give Rails time to mature a little bit more.
Castor has been in the field since what ? 6 years ? It’s still not 1.0. So the numbering scheme does not really mean anything (anyone is entitled to his opinion on Castor to see if it’s worth 1.0 or not).
And Ruby released its 1.0 in 1996. I have been looking at it since around 2001 but still did not find the time to really go into it…and I obviouslly haven’t missed THAT much.
Deploying rails requires a bit more sysadmin-y knowledge than dropping a war into tomcat or jetty — configuring apache is still more difficult than getting a default servlet container running, but if you know apache it isn’t difficult by any measure. The mod_fcgi and apache2 thing is really annoying, but there are good alternatives.
Ruby is a solid and mature language, rails is a very young framework, apache we all know =)
There are apps I would not do in rails, period, and ones I wouldn’t do in cocoon, period. Each its own =)
-Brian
hi there,
there’s a book called ” Enterprise integration with Ruby” from the same publisher (none of the same authors though).
i18n, l10n, thread support need to improve before a mature java shop will consider adopting ruby as a replacement — but I’m guessing that these will happen in about 2 years — maybe earlier if RoR becomes more successfull OR if a big company adopts Ruby/RoR.
my 2 cents.
BR,
~A
What’s this got to do with being “enterprise ready”?
Eh. I’m kind of mixed feelings about it. The sysadmin side of me is screaming that this is Bad Idea due to the fact that everything relies on gems and if you’re looking at a future where you have a cluster of servers to run an app, the chaos of managing 10 machines and making sure all their configs stay in sync is frightening.
But the programmer side of me is impressed at how quickly and easily I’ve been able to put something together. Also, adjusting to changing/evolving requirements has actually been fun… the framework has made design flexible and implementation simple. That’s something that I haven’t seen/felt in a few years.
Yeah, I probably wouldn’t use it to switch Amazon over to just yet. But if I was whipping up a simple web interface for an in-house network monitoring tool… you bet I’d use it.
Rails is weak on presentation, currently the options are RHTML or RXML or whatever. After being exposed to Cocoon’s industrial-strength presentation abilities, I was a little let down by Rails.
That being said, Ruby:Java::Rails:Struts. Comparing Rails to Java is like comparing Struts to Ruby. Apples to Oranges