I'm currently studying Ubuntu Server administration, and also HTML/CSS. When it comes to the application logic I can see huge advantages in using a reputable CMS like Drupal or Joomla. I find though that both of these are implemented in PHP. I wish to study Rails as Ruby makes a nice switch from the ubiquitous C-style syntax. With PHP dominating the majority of web applications released in the last few years; should I just bite the bullet and learn it along with CodeIgniter, or should I go with Ruby on Rails and work with one of the smaller compatible Rails CMSs out there?
There's no reason to choose one over the other when you can learn both.
You might have to pick one now, and the one you pick should provide the most value for you in the least amount of time (for example, if most of your jobs are in PHP, continue to focus on getting better in PHP and PHP-based systems). However, if you have time, you should continually learn new languages, techniques, and paradigms - it will only make you a better developer.
If you are more or less an experienced programmer, go with Rails and learn something new and different, even more if you plan to re-use your code as a freelancer. Also take a look at HAML and SASS (yes, HTML and CSS are ancient and outdated as PHP)
Related
soliciting advice about upgrading (or re-writing?) a legacy app. It's a single page webapp with lots of dynamically generated windows and forms, roughly comprised of
13,000 lines in .rb files
11,000 lines in .erb files
25,000 lines of javascript (not including large 3rd party libraries that bring this to nearer 60000 lines)
This acts as a UI for end users of our system, which also has a number of core business services (mostly written in Java, with a small amount of Node.js) and a fairly sizeable MySQL database (>200GB). Some of these services push AJAX to the client browser for real-time updates.
Reasons for upgrade
It's ruby 1.8.7, rails 2.3.15. Most of the core code dates from 2009. This makes it both insecure and hard to maintain (think "predates the existence of gemfiles".)
The app has been maintained by Java devs for most of its life, as most of the company's devs have been hired as Java devs to work on all the other services that perform business logic. It's probably safe to assume that this has lead to lots of hacks from people who didn't want to break anything, and certainly lots will not be done in a "rails way".
The javascript is also a bit of a mess. It's got a knot of frameworks (the original Angular is used sporadically; jquery and prototype are both fighting over the $ symbol in different places.) There are files that are 7000 lines long.
the css styling has been upgraded since 2009(!) but is starting to look a little tired. We'd like to implement a bootstrap theme that will look sharp without too much front-end skill, but right now the code that renders all of our pop-up windows, sidebars etc breaks badly if we try and add bootstrap.
It would be nice to modernise our push servers, replacing them with websockets.
Context
There are 3 of us on the dev team- this is my first job, and I've only been here since January. Of the other two, one has only been here about 4 months longer than me, and it's his first dev job too. The other guy is the only one who has ever spoken to someone who spoke to someone from the original team.
Oh, and of course we have little or no test coverage.
Options
When I was hired (as a Java developer), I was told that we were looking to replace the website with one based on Spring MVC. This effort is partially underway, having been attacked in drips and drabs over a couple of years. Because different devs who never met have attacked it as if it's their own brand new project, the same problems are solved in different ways in different places. They've tried some flashy techniques such as custom annotations that I find hard to follow, but as far as I can tell don't fully work. The most senior of us estimates it would take our team a year's dedicated full-time work to finish it (which is not a realistic business proposition, based on how many requests for new features we get from customers).
I'm inclined to upgrade the website rather than spin out a new one. This is partly because I can see the sense in that post. Another reason is that we're all employed as jack-of-all trade full stack developers (doubling as DBAs, sysadmins, etc...). We've got no particular expertise in UI design, and the UI for our present interface, although dated, is pretty user-friendly; it feels like a blank canvas would throw that structure out, and play to our weaknesses. Upgrading ruby/rails would also make any features we add during the upgrade much easier to add to the new site.
Apparently some experienced ruby devs who are friends with my boss have advised him informally it'd be so much work to bring the website up to date that it would be comparable to a complete re-write, which was the motivation for the spring project. This would have the advantage of only having to think about Java + javascript, and not trying to hire people who know both Java and ruby well.
Conventional wisdom seems to be upgrade rails in stages. I'm not sure how well this would work for us, for 2 reasons. For one thing, there 3 major versions for us to upgrade, which might have significant changes between them. More importantly, the code needs some TLC anyway with refactoring and the creation of a test suite.
I'm inclined to follow the following strategy:
Invest some developer time in training, to get a sense of the relevant best practises and the "rails ways" of doing things, rather than the "good enough to hack" knowledge most of us have now.
fire up a new rails 5.1 project on ruby 2.4.0
Configure active record to use our old database
Copy across the javascript from the public folder of the existing project in to the relevant parts of the asset pipeline and save that headache for "phase 2".
Sort out a gemfile with updated versions of our dependencies (for example, mysql gem has been replaced by a mysql2 gem.) Installing rubocop seems like a good idea at this point.
Copy files across from old to new project one at a time. Read the code, figure out what it's doing, write the relevant tests, fix where they break. Use the ruby API and rails upgrade guides to update the syntax. Refactor until rubocop is appeased.
Once we've reproduced the functionality of the existing site, write a new stackoverflow post on how to sort out the javascript ;)
This certainly sounds like a lot of work, but seems less likely to produce a buggy mess than trying to reproduce our existing functionality from scratch in a different language. So...
Questions
Does this strategy seem sensible? Is this a case where the re-write is really a better option? Is tackling the JS separately the best call, or is it better to restructure it as we're examining the calls to it from the views? Or should we really upgrade -> 3.0, 3.1, ... 5.0, 5.1?
We've altered the database manually, adding new tables, new fields and whatnot directly rather than using .rails generate. 'Rails magic' seems to make this work at present, but should we anticipate problems in step 3?
Is there any logical order in which to approach the migration of ruby? As there's major changes to the routing, which is the central entry point of the application, it seems sensible to start there, followed by authentication, then the main page, and then add functions one at a time.
Part of the problem is "not knowing what we don't know" about the rails way of doing things. Apart from the canonical Ruby/Rails tutorials (Hartl, Ruby Monk, Ruby Koans, Kehoe's rails book), is there any essential reading we should be aware of before trying to take on such a large job? I'm especially thinking about things that may not be immediately obvious, like proper use of helper functions, module structure, etc.
Any other advice, comments, prayers, ... welcome!
Up to now I've always used PHP with or without a framework but a month ago I decided to start something new: Ruby and Rails, I found them quite easy and similar to PHP and some PHP frameworks in how they works but using a simpler syntax and many other advantages.
Some days ago I started reading about Node.js, Node.js vs Rails, "why node.js is better"...
I'm a bit confused but my objective is to learn something modern that will not become obsolete in a few months so:
What are the main differences between Rails/Ruby and Node.js and a framework based on it like Express.js (except that one is written in JS and the other in Ruby)?
What are the main advantages/disadvantages of using Node.js and framework based on it instead of a Ruby based solution like Rails?
Thanks!
There aren't enough differences between Node.js and Rails for it to practically matter.
A lot of what Node.js can do can be pulled off in Rails with things like EventMachine and Pusher. So unless you are really familiar with Rails' limitations, and know you'll be pushing the boundaries, you'd be hard pressed to make something a seasoned Rails developer couldn't do.
Having built apps in Node and Express I can say that they alone aren't enough to make a sexy application. They can seem just as old and stale if you don't have an outstanding frontend UI to facilitate the backend possibilities. Instead of comparing backend servers, I think the real future of doing amazing things is in front-end JavaScript frameworks like Backbone.js that use Express/Rails/Node.js on the backend.
I have chosen to go in the direction of Backbone.js with Rails as my backend API server. Because it's so easy to rapidly create a very nice RESTful backend server in Rails. Rails also makes working with CoffeeScript and precompiling/organizing Backbone code a breeze. There are already decent Backbone.js gems out there for Rails.
The Rails core is also able to acknowledge and embrace the fact that frontend JS MVCs are logically a good next step, and they have been working to strengthen the bond between the two. For those same reasons they have also worked to make Rails an even better API server so that it can work with frontend JS easier. Node.js and Express aren't putting as much effort to coordinate with frontend JavaScript MVCs as the Rails community is.
Being good with a JavaScript frontend MVC and Rails as a backend makes you also great for both worlds in terms of getting a job. You will easily be able to hop onto a Node.js project and add value to that team with your superior frontend experience, and you can also roll with the punches on a Ruby on Rails team and add value to them as well.
As official Node.js website explains it:
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
On the other hand Ruby on Rails official website says:
Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.
Given this I guess that it is more appropriate to compare Ruby and Node.js, but even this is not quite right given that Ruby is programming language and Node.js is NOT. You could probably compare JavaScript with Ruby but I guess that is not what you meant to ask with this question :)
So, for me, key point in understanding what Node.js truly tries to accomplish is well described on Node.js about page. Key Node.js idea (for me) is described in this sentences:
Node is similar in design to and influenced by systems like Ruby's Event Machine or Python's Twisted. Node takes the event model a bit further—it presents the event loop as a language construct instead of as a library. In other systems there is always a blocking call to start the event-loop. Typically one defines behavior through callbacks at the beginning of a script and at the end starts a server through a blocking call like EventMachine::run(). In Node there is no such start-the-event-loop call. Node simply enters the event loop after executing the input script. Node exits the event loop when there are no more callbacks to perform. This behavior is like browser javascript—the event loop is hidden from the user.
What this should enable you, is that you should be able to easily write highly concurrent programs without even thinking about concurrency using JavaScript syntax and callback functions as basic concurrent runnable units.
Your fear that either Rails or Node.js will be gone in a week is unfounded. Rails has a large community and will be around for a very long time even though currently (early 2012) it's getting a bit of hate thrown its way. Node.js is just getting started and has so much attention I don't think it will have any problems getting to the Rails level some day.
That said I've been evaluating Node.js and Rails as options for a project and the reasons I choose Node.js over Rails are:
"The Rails Way" - In my (admittedly limited) experience with Rails it really seems like you either do it the Rails way or you are going to be in for a world of pain. A big part of the Rails way is to use the ActiveRecord model. The advantage of this is that there are a lot of gems that work with your code happily because they know you'll be using ActiveRecord. The disadvantage is you are mixing your data access & model. I am not a fan of this idea so the Rails way for me still seems a bit.. off.
JavaScript is a key part of client side web development and the idea of using it on the client and server is interesting. I'm not super strong at JavaScript and I can't imagine a better way to get better then to have to use it everywhere.
My project has real time communication needs which while I'm sure can be done in Rails there seems to be quite a bit of positive mention on Nodes ability to handle this with socket.io being the front runner option.
At the end of the day no matter which you choose you will have a great time & learn a ton of new stuff that will change how you write code. If you're not on a big time crunch I'd recommend building a small project management tool in both and see which you prefer.
Either way.. Good Luck!
2 things - performance & productivity.
Performance (more details here)
(source: jslang.info)
Productivity (how fast you can build that app)
Ruby on Rails is specialized and highly productive tool for creating so called Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications (99% of internet sites are such apps). In my subjective judgement and experience in this area Rails about 2-4 times more productive than node.js or express.js.
For Web 3.0 apps (realtime things, client-side MVC, etc.) this isn't true, RoR doesn't keep its advantage there.
So choice depends on use case and priorities.
I know a lot more about Node.js than I do about Ruby. That being said, Ruby is much more widely adopted. It is currently a very hot skill to have in the work place. Some may argue with me on this but I think that Node.js is still "under development" and will be for a little bit longer. It has a lot of promise but just hasn't been adopted by many companies and projects yet.
thanks for opening my question :)
I am a university student in Computer Engineering, and I've always done class projects in Java (apart from C, and Assembly, but for very specific things). Apart from that, I have worked for quite a lot of time on a web app done in ActionScript 3, contained in .jsp files and deployed onto a Google App Engine site.
Having that said, I now pretend to do a prototype of another web app, which will have registered users with blogs and a messaging system between them.
My question is, having time as a restraint (I have month and a half), and needing just to build a working prototype, could anyone tell me, in his/her opinion, what would be the best framework for me to start learning and use? (Take into account my Java & ActionScript background) I believe RoR is the most common in these cases, as its easy and quick, but I have no Ruby knowledge at all, and maybe it would be quicker for me to learn Scala (which coming fromJava shouldn't be that different) and Lift, and do it with them instead.
Many thanks in advance!
Pepillo
Last year I found myself in a very similar situation for creating a web based relationship browser for a computing science class. I would highly recommend RoR. Granted you will need to spend some time getting up to speed with Ruby, but it is well worth the small amount of time to learn. There is excellent documentation available and a ton of good tutorials.
Rails can generate much of the core code and database schema with the generator functions in seconds (see scaffolding generators). Considering your time constraint, I think this alone makes rails a good choice.
In terms of learning Ruby, you should not have much trouble with this if you are comfortable with any dynamically typed scripting languages.
Anyway, that has been my experience with rails. Good luck on your project!
I think I'm going with Play! Not only is the easiest for me, as I am a Java guy, but it's also the quickest when in conjuntion with Japid, according to a benchmark I saw.
I used Java for about 7 years now, mostly for web applications, and recently started using RoR. I must say it was really easy to pick up and get started. After only 2 months of working on my own project I started using it for a customer projects and it was far more easier to deliver production code then I had anticipated. So yes I can recommend Ruby and it was not hard at all to pick up.
However, RoR does require a nix platform like apple os or linux. I stated out with windows but there are simply too many drawbacks and bugs.
If you decide to go with ruby I can higly recommend Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) to get you started.
I want to make a community based site, which is Drupal's strength. However I also want to try other frameworks, especially Rails.
One of the best things about drupal is its huge modules library. If I were to switch to Rails, would I be able to find similar functionality freely available as plugins, or would I have to rebuild?
Does Rails have the equivalent of (as plugins or gems):
CCK/Fields?
Node Reference?
Views / Views Relationships?
PathAuto?
Threaded Commenting?
Multisite Functionality?
Apache Solr (or equivalent) Integration?
Thanks.
I'm afraid you'll probably hear this answer a lot, but it's not a suitable comparison.
Drupal is a ultimately a CMS, Rails is a framework. Apples to oranges, or perhaps even Apple Juice to oranges. Out of the box, you fire up Drupal and it does 'things': it has a database structure, the concept of nodes, interfaces blah, blah. If you fire up Rails you have an empty project.
As far as I know there isn't a "Drupal-on-Rails" project that would be a suitable equivalent. However, I can attest to the fact that there is an awful lot of Ruby/Rails community and O/S work out there and you might find something suitable. I'd also say that the level of modularity in Ruby and Rails tends to mean that the range of plugins/modules/gems one can use is much greater.
My personal $0.02. If Drupal does what you need, just use Drupal: it's mature and has a great community. It's never a good idea to try to port Project X over to a new language as a learning exercise because you'll inevitable fall into the "Well that's how it's done in language X!" trap and become disenchanted with the new system.
If you're wanting to learn Rails (which you should, it's awesome) I'd suggest you'd be best working on a small project and seeing what the ecosystem offers before deciding if it's suitable for the needs of your bigger projects.
I have to second what Govan said, but add to it.
With Drupal, unless you really want to get into building your own modules and extensions you are really interacting with an application. Even when you start using CCK, all you are really doing is flipping switches, filling in forms and defining new options for content on the site.
Ruby on Rails is two things, and neither of them bares much similarity to Drupal. You asked "How hard is it really?". To answer that you need to understand what both Ruby and Rails are. Ruby is a programming language designed to make the life of the object purist programmer simpler and more pleasant. So, the first part of how hard is it is simply to answer "how long do you feel it would take you to learn a completely new programming language, like PHP but different".
Rails is an 'opinionated' framework. It's opinionated in that it lays out how a Ruby web project should be structured, as well as providing multiple APIs for everything from database access to web presentation. To answer the "how hard is it" question for Rails then (assuming you know Ruby by this point), you have to answer how much do you need to learn about cacheing, database design, page design, RESTful programming etc etc.
It's not a short journey. you asked if there is an equivalent to CCK for Ruby and Rails which implies to me that at this point your knowledge of programming is somewhat limited. Ruby and Rails interact with the database. CCK lets you define things in a database. Thus, with Ruby and Rails you are effectively bypassing the wonderful dialogs and forms that CCK provides you with and doing the data definition bits yourself, by hand, in code.
From experience, when I've hired experts in another programming language and framework into my Rails teams, it has taken them between 1 and 3 months to get productive, and a further 3 to 6 months for their productivity to start to raise and approach that of the Rails experts on my team.
Thus, in your particular case, I would not recommend a switch away from Drupal to Ruby on Rails.
Drupal (core) on ohloh (130k lines of code) is estimated to be 34 years of work worth.
Drupal (contributions) on ohloh (modules for Drupal 4-6 (7M lines of code)) is estimated to be 2113 years of work.
That is the power of a community, and that is something that you can never replicate. I remeber there was a guy, who tried to port Drupal to python calling it drupy, but that project died before something useful ever came out of it. Even if you copy the code, you can never copy the community.
The thing you need to realize, is that each community is different. So even if you find a project that can solve your code needs in a RoR or a different language/framework, it will never be like Drupal and vice versa.
So don't try to find a replacement for Drupal, but go explore and try new things. You might end up learning new things, that you can use for your Drupal projects.
I've read this times and times again that people saying comparing drupal an ror is comparing apple to orange which is wrong.
I think the saying itself BS. Yes we want to compare apple to orange and find out which is better. We even want to compare apple to steak. Said that, they are different. Yes, we all know. I have limited experience with either. I first thought Drupal was great and can help me build the website I wanted overnight (or over a week or month) then it didn't happen (not blaming Drupal).
My impression is that, Drupal maybe still great but it has a learning curve and needs a lot of other knowledge or talents to use it well and tweak it. RoR on the other hand is a more general framework and needs programming (Drupal needs too actually).
If you are more of a web designer person with a little PHP maybe Drupal is better fit.
If you are more of a web developer type don't want to spend time looking for modules and make them work but rather do them yourself (not really from ground up) then maybe RoR is for you (with the same amount of learning). So yes they are both good for different purpose, background, etc.
For now I will go with RoR (or dJango and other ORANGEs). My 2 cents.
Rails, since version 3.0, has officially adopted the once-controversial engine way of incorporating third-party apps. this is roughly the equivalent of Drupal's modules/plug-ins, from a 10k foot perspective. To build a community-based site, you could make use of an engine called, appropriately enough, "Community Engine." http://communityengine.org/features.html"
The Rails ecosystem doesn't have anywhere near the same number of modules Drupalists have available to them, but there are enough good quality ones to cover the chief basics.
Drupal has so many strong areas, its hard for just one or two people to recreate it in a decent amount of time with any language. PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.
You have the core node system, taxonomy, aliasing, menus, users, permissions, and modules, the database api, and form api, among others.
You'd have to know how to assemble all these pieces independently and create the structure necessary for it to all work together.
It would take more than 'a few hours'. I would say, even if you are a ROR master, you're looking at a year to two years of solid consistent work to get the best parts of Drupal for a new system.
I'm about to start building a tumblr clone that handles multiple users (so premade clones like Gelato won't cut it) and I'm not sure which framework I'd like to build this is.
Right now, I'm only intending to build a prototype. Something I can get a dozen friends on to test the concept and grow to maybe a couple hundred users to prove the market, so I'm not worried about long term scale. My biggest concern right now is quick deployment. I'd like to get from zero to signups in as short a time as possible, with as little customization to the framework of choice as possible.
I have experience with PHP, but not Ruby. However, I don't think the learning curve would be too steep so I'm not ruling out rails. I just want the framework that is most appropriate for a system like a multi-user tumblr clone so that I can build it with as little hassle, and as quickly, as possible.
If anyone has experience with a similar project, or with these frameworks and can offer an insightful perspective, I'd be very appreciative.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
Cheers,
~Jordan Feldstein
Definitely Rails. It'd much faster to develop project like this in Rails.
As far as I saw, PHP is lightyears behind from Rails in ORMs. And Rails routing is much better than any PHP framework's as well.
I have been developing in PHP since 2000, and still have a bunch of PHP systems in production (using both CodeIgniter and CakePHP).
I have found Rails to be incredibly more efficient to develop in ... easily 50% more productivity, depending on the use-case. Faster, higher quality. Easy choice for me.
+1 for Rails.
I can't speak about Codeigniter. My general understanding echoes the above statements. Lightweight and no fully object oriented.
I have developed in CakePHP since Jan 2006, after trying to get Rails deployed on my own server and failing badly. Rails was not easy to deploy back then...at least not for me. At the time Cake was the best alternative, and still is in many ways.
Cake is a very competent framework. However, I agree with the statements that it is in many ways far "behind" Rails. Some features are not as well designed, less integrated or simplified in comparison.
A few months ago I spent a couple of day porting one of my Cake apps to Rails2. Just as an exercise. The learning curve was very shallow for someone like me (with a decent grasp of the concepts that Cake and Rails are built on). We recently started porting one of our apps at work to Rails (also from Cake) because we found that support for a lot of things that are important to us are available in Rails or Ruby but not available or as complete in Cake and PHP.
If you are unsure about switching to Ruby you might want to look at Lithium (previously CakePHP v3). It is PHP 5.3 only and still a good way from 1.0 but the community is active and generally it looks like what Cake might have been if it had been started today and not 2005.
CodeIgniter is very lightweight, which is probably to the detriment of this project if you want to code as little as possible.
CakePHP is pretty much an attempt to port Rails to PHP, so choosing between those two frameworks will depend on other factors.
One factor would be whether you want to learn Ruby or not. I have dabbled in it, and feel it is superior to PHP, but more practical concerns keep me from experimenting with it more (have to use PHP at work).
Another concern would be hosting. I use Dreamhost, and the fee is the same for PHP and Rails. However, a friend of mine just got a GoDaddy hosting account, and he actually has to pay a higher monthly fee to have a Passenger-enabled host.