I been intersted in ruby and rails lately but what I always encounter in blog/ podcast / book is they will always teach how to use ruby or rails plugin/ ruby instead of writing one. Did we really always need to use plugin, even thing like authorization? Authenticate? Is it really waste time Or hard to write from start? Then if it hard and waste time why rails say make web development less painful?
Or I was wrong in term of concept? Goal ? Or anything else? Of rails? Anyone can guide me ?
It can be a good learning experience to write your own tagging system, or authentication system, or what have you. That's one argument for "rolling your own".
The argument for using libraries is the "standing on the shoulders of giants" concept. By using popular, actively-developed libraries, you can be reasonably sure that they're well-tested in multiple production environments and are extremely stable. And it gives you more time to focus on your actual application.
As an example, I would be very wary of writing my own system to process credit card payments when there are already full-featured, well-tested alternatives.
I think it really has to do with edge cases. With something you build yourself, you can think of many of the edge cases up front, but there are just as many that you will not be able to think of until you come to them. That's where the time savings comes in.
That being said, if you don't understand how to write an authentication system, then you should probably write your own. Conceptually you should fully understand how the parts of your app work, and if you don't, writing from scratch is a good way to learn. But with things that you already understand, I recommend using a gem.
Related
I'm trying to come up with things that Ruby (or Rails) either doesn't handle well, or things that are way too hard to do in Ruby.
So far I'm having a tough time, but I figured some people on here MUST have know some things that Ruby or Rails don't handle too well.
Anyone?
Ruby is a language. Rails is a framework. Many of the things Rails isn't good at, such as anything not relating to a web framework, Ruby handles with ease.
The other question of what Ruby as a language is not good at is simple. Anything extremely performance intensive is probably better written in C. Ruby won't run natively on most smart phone devices so mobile apps are out. Ruby is not designed for embedded devices, so powering the next space shuttle launch is also a no go. Furthermore the lack of a maternal instinct make Ruby a bad choice to watch young infants.
There is nothing, it's simply perfect. ;-)
Ok, some downsides:
Ruby has questionable parallelism and threading support. See for more details: http://www.igvita.com/2008/11/13/concurrency-is-a-myth-in-ruby/
Windows support isn't up to par since most Ruby developers simple don't care (like me)
The stuff you'll most commonly hear about scaling issues is a myth. Unless you're making a second twitter perhaps.
There's very little you flat-out couldn't do in Ruby, but there's a few things you wouldn't want to do, mainly involving highly numerical computation. For most of those you could easily write a binding to a C-based API (or some other more performant library.) Image processing, for example, is something that would be dog slow for any non-trivial example in pure Ruby, but you can use RMagick to do it, which is a binding to the much-faster ImageMagick library.
Just about any other use for Ruby is fair game. I've written GUI apps with it, a lot of system services and more one-off scripts than I could count.
Well, it's a framework, so it optimizes for the most common cases. If your app requires unordinary and bizarre things (eg huge performance requirements, needs to use non-Ruby libraries), then Rails might not be suitable.
It seems to me that whenever a company hits these cases (usually performance rather than functionality or integration with other systems) they have to write their own stuff - Google has Big Table, Facebook has their own webserver, etc.
If you're in this position, you're most likely rolling in money and spending some of it to rewrite your code isn't going to be an issue.
However, Rails is great for most normal apps! I don't think it has any gaps that might cause pitfalls in normal cases.
I've put some of my free time on reading/learning about cakephp but now I'm wondering if will not be better to switch completely to ruby on rails.
Can you give me the good and the bad of those tools, when is about web-development?
many thx
Why switch? Since you've got a head start on CakePHP, take a little break.
Learn some Ruby on Rails for a while, then switch back to CakePHP when the mood strikes you.
That way, in the end, you'll end up knowing two languages/frameworks rather than just one. It's always better to get as much exposure as possible. Each has its benefits and downsides, but why not learn enough to make the decision yourself?
Neither is better than the other. While one may be more suited to particular applications than the other, they are certainly both good frameworks.
PHP is said to be faster, Ruby is objectively a better designed language. These probably make more of a difference than the framework itself - you can always modify the libraries or write your own classes to make the framework do what you want it to.
My advice is to stick with what you know if you are happy with it - learning a new framework is a long process. If you have issues with Cake or you're keen to try something different, Rails is definitely worthwhile.
I recently read a good article from a developer with a CakePHP base who just completed a large Ruby on Rails project.
http://www.jimmycuadra.com/blog/10-from-cake-to-rails
He details where Rails is stronger than Cake but also the other way around. Another blog here compares Ruby and PHP.
http://developingwithstyle.com/articles/2009/06/09/10-reasons-why-ruby-is-better-than-php-reason-5.html
personally i would choose cakephp at this moment. php and mysql are very common on most web hosting packages, even free ones. it is based on php and there is a huge amount of resources to learn and get help from. you can reuse many already written classes.
regarding the speed of cakephp, there are ways how to speed up cakephp in the production environment through the ways you code and caching.
I would choose ruby on rails because
ruby is fun to write
there is a great community
there are more high quality resources like www.railscasts.com and teachmetocode.com
I am (quite) an experienced programmer but totally new to Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
RoR looks great to get working quickly, specially the automatic screen generation for CRUD operations.
It really it gets you productive quickly.
The questions is with the last 20% of the work, when I must finish my application. Won't RoR conventions stand in my way? Because not every database table must be available for all users, and not all users can edit all columns and/or all rows, and the views must be adapted to my site's look and feel, etc.
I understand RoR has been used successfully in live sites, but how exactly do you gain enough speed in RoR to escape gravity after the first phase has been burned out.
I don't think scaffolding gets you 80% there. Scaffolding is nice in that it shows you how the pieces of Rails fit together, but I wouldn't build my application off of scaffolding code. Now that you've been impressed by scaffolding it's best that you forget all about it. :)
Where Rails really shines in my mind is database migrations, the awesomeness of how dynamic ActiveRecord is, and the plugin ecosystem.
There's a lot to learn when deciding to go with Rails. You have a new language, new framework, and new plugins - but if you take the time to learn those things you can be very productive with Rails.
I've been doing ruby on rails for quite sometime. The 80/20 problem is not unique for rails. It applies generally to the entire world. I'm also not aware of any framework that can just do business logic for you.
To answer your specific questions. Conventions will not stand in your way while doing the 20%. Instead, conventions will help you to get through that 20% quicker.
Personally, for user authentication, I use Authlogic. For user authorization, I use Lockdown or Authorization plugin depending on customer need.
I also use inherited_resource in most of my projects to simplify controller code. This is another power of convention.
To increase speed of development, you will not only need to know Rails, but rails gems/plugins that does the right things for you, so you don't have to reinvent the wheels again. Also, knowing Ruby language is a must for quickly develop beyond the 80%.
Ruby Toolbox provides some of the most popular gems and plugins used in typical rails projects targeted at specific domains. You can look through the relevant categories and know what most people use. (And it's probably a good idea to use popular, well maintained gems)
TDD/BDD style development will also help you to speed up in the long run.
Lastly, a warning: If you stray away from rails convention, you will have a painful time in general.
P.S. I used Merb before. My feeling is that conventions helps you in merb, but you won't get too much penalty for not following them in merb. However, my experience with Rails is that if you decide not to follow rails convention while developing rails app, it will come back to bite you in one way or another! So think twice when you really attempted to stray away from rails conventions... (This is from my own experience, and of course subjective, but you can think of it as a warning...)
Won't RoR conventions stand in my way?
Because not every database table must
be available for all users, and not
all users can edit all columns and/or
all rows, and the views must be
adapted to my site's look and feel,
etc.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur. Rails is a framework that has been lifted from real world applications. Those applications had to deal with all those issues also, as well as others you may not have thought of yet. Generally, the conventions make life easier once you learn them.
Another point is that the conventions are merely conventions. You don't have to follow them. You do not even have to use RoR for everything, though I've yet to find a case where I didn't/couldn't, I do generally try to push as much into the DB or cache layers as possible.
I don't believe that you'll ever have a serious problem with Rails conventions. Just stick with the conventions and trust the RoR system. The people behind Rails put a lot of effort into these conventions to support 99% of the common usage scenarios.
If you really need to do something outside the conventions it will eventually get complicated quite fast. However, you are not alone. There are a lots of excellent resources on the net to get help (for example the StackOverflow community).
To sum it up:
Stick with the conventions whenever possible (excellent resource to get started: Rails Guides.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Look for Rails plugins and Ruby Gems instead (don't forget GitHub).
Consult the StackOverflow community if you need something out of the ordinary.
Test all the f***ing time (just for fun).
Duplicate: Django or Ruby-On-Rails?
I have been reading on Ruby on Rails, and it seems like on some threads, some users like Django a lot too?
Can someone who have used both give some insight about using them, such as
ease of use
productivity
fun factor
deployment issues
or any other framework you'd highly recommend?
Both are excellent frameworks. Though, I've found Rails to be more suited for the agile developer. For the most part, you'll run some generators to get the files you need as placeholders for your code. Things will work right away, and you just build up from these conventions. It's really flexible and has a large community, lots of innovation and interesting practices are being put into Rails. It's development cycle seems faster paced than Django.
After only touching the surface with Django, it has some interesting differences. As far as I know, you don't get the schema migrations like Rails has out of the box. But you get an extremely simple CRUD mechanism for your models with the extensible admin interface, which is great for testing/managing content. The entire project is documented really well, from the Django Book to the vast amount of information on docs.djangoproject.com.
I personally prefer the Rails way of doing things. But honestly, you need to try them both to see what works for you, and since we're talking about two very good, yet totally different frameworks, it's a tough decision to make either way. So, if you already know Ruby or Python well enough, start with what you know and just go from there. Once you understand how one works, you'll be able to evaluate the smaller differences yourself. Hope that helps.
I am working on a project for a client of the IT company I work for and I am convinced that Rails is perfect for it. I have a meeting in the next day or so, where I am afraid I am going to get bombarded with "why Rails?" type questions, and no doubt, a whole bunch of rhetoric like "Rails doesn't scale", "Rails is just a CMS" and the thousand other myths people seem to have about Ruby on Rails.
We have all seem the arguments about how Rails doesn’t scale, it’s hard to deploy or that it will explode in your hands at any given moment. For those of us that use Rails on a daily basis, we know that just like any other language or framework. It seems like there is a lot of misinformation about RoR and often Rails gets a bad wrap. To help me with this meeting, I was hoping to compile a list of myths - perhaps one myth per answer - and we can vote for the myths we've heard before - to eliminate the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that often clouds the truth about Rails.
After some googling I found this blog post which is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to collate here. As David Heinemeier Hansson says in the post:
So I thought it would be about time to
set the record straight on a number of
unfounded fears, uncertainties, and
doubts. I'll be going through these
myths one at the time and showing you
exactly why they're just not true.
This is not really to convince you
that you should be using Rails. Only
you can make that choice. But to give
you the facts so you can make your own
informed decision. One that isn't
founded in the many myths floating
around.
Let's Clarify!
Myth: "Ruby on Rails doesn't scale"
Bust: That is not a specific, answerable question. Please clarify.
Saying that whatever-technology "doesn't scale" sounds very professional and very enterprisey - but it's not a clear question. It's just a lazy way of dismissing the unknown/unproven I'd ask for clarification:
"What precisely do you mean by 'scale'? and how do you measure it at the moment?"
It could mean:
Maximum user sessions
Average response time given load
Throughput of given concurrent scenarios per server in a fixed time.
... difficulties organising the project so a large team of developers could work on it.
There are lots of ways of dealing with "scale" but until you know which one you're dealing with it's not always obvious what to do about it.
There are loads of ruby-based solutions, including
caching fragments of HTML
sharding the application across multiple databases
pre-computing work that's shared between users
pushing lots of view-rendering work off into AJAX/Javascript land so it happens on the client
using a front-end web server more efficiently
just use more hardware (i.e. developer time is expensive & hardware prices fall) but this approach depends on a shallow rate of growth in demand
doing less interactively and having more batch work
doing only part of the work in ruby - e.g. existing legacy backend+rails frontend, or maybe the transactions through a functional programming system+rails frontend
If the challenger can't come up with a specific meaning of "scale" then it isn't a valid concern.
However if the challenger does come up with something specific and measurable, then I'd use a timeboxed, spike solution ( http://c2.com/xp/SpikeSolution.html ) to come back with some numbers - and possibly a few options on how to do it.
Make the argument from the only perspective the client understands, money!
Show how long you think it will take to make in Java, JSP, or whichever is their current technology, together with the pros and cons, such as easier to obtain developers. Then, state the timescales in Ruby, which for sure will be lower development costs, but also at a cost of the admins having to deploy a different system, possibly harder to recruit staff who know Rails, etc. Its their money, so give them the facts and let them make the decision.
In response to the specific criticisms a company could have against Ruby on Rails compared to their own systems there are many reasons a company can give, some of them not specific to Ruby or Rails, such as they already have many Java develops in house, or existing infrastructure written in Java, which will always be easier to use with a same language system such as Java. Anyway, to answer your specific points:
1) Why Rails?
Simple, Rails is "designed " for building web sites, and does an efficient job. Find some statistics to back you up (I'm not saying the statistics in the link are accurate but numbers will always impress a client)
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33120
2) Rails doesn't scale
http://trak3r.blogspot.com/2008/03/rails-doesnt-scale.html
3) Rails is just a CMS?
If they are building a CMS then recommend Drupal, not Rails
I guess you will have to think on your feet when you answer your clients questions, and they will want someone who understand other frameworks apart from just Rails, kind of like using the right tool for the right job
Myth: Rails is not mature enough to have the plethora of hardened open source libraries built around it that one needs to pull off a large scale project quickly and reliably.
Bust: In fact, there are a ton of gems and plugins available to the RoR community, many of which have been tried and found true by the active community. Not only are the resources there, but they are simple to manage with 'gem' and Rails' built-in plugin architecture. Worst case scenario: you can't find that perfect gem or plugin. In that case you can easily write your own or borrow from the Java world if you use JRuby.
Myth: it is hard to hire a good Ruby on Rails programmer.
(Actually, I can't bust it, that's just an idea of a potential myth. Who can, please, edit this one or create another answer)