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0 pointsfat0wl11y ago0 comments

yes I don't want to get into a flamewar either, but I am an ex-RoR dev and since switching to enterprise Java I hear almost nothing about it largely due to enormously widespread acceptance of Spring (JavaEE is even re-gaining some traction).

Long story short (and hope my facts are right! not swearing by this, was just some googling...), I had to optimize some old code for an RoR client I freelance for and wanted to add in some more advanced ORM (still fairly simple though, mapping entity results from a stored procedure query). All the solutions I saw for this involved kindof hacking the db connector to execute some raw queries. I was curious as to why such a basic feature wouldn't be natively supported, so eventually I found some forum posts asking why it isnt (it may be by now) and all the responses were in the vein of: "That is not the Rails way and therefore the core team chooses not to support those types of features".

I know people think Java is too bulky & sprawling but after 6 months with JPA, SpringData, Spring JDBC etc. I was kindof left with the feeling "Man, there is a bit of a learning curve to pick up the overarching concepts of the Java ecosystem and its design paradigms at first, but once you are over that hump you can do more, easier with any ORM lib than with ActiveRecord". I know there is another Ruby ORM gaining traction (DataMapper) but it just seems that the opinionated nature of Ruby/Rails core dev teams makes it doomed & dangerous for enterprise use (and indeed maybe its not even their goal).

The Java approach is bulky and design-by-committee for sure but their userbase seems to demand that the fullest possible spectrum of features be supported, and then the library developers try to provide their recommended approach for new projects. Also the specs expand pretty quickly... had to use JPA 2.0 for some projects and found myself constantly frustrated because in the advancement to 2.1 there seemed to be a landslide of awesomeness added to support missing advanced database features.

I guess its one of those things where now it feels like a breath of fresh air thinking "I have more power in my pinky than....". It's a shame too cuz I still get calls from companies in a lurch desperate for RoR devs but philosophically I just can't bring myself to go back in that direction after seeing how unscary & mind-bogglingly powerful the enterprise langs have become. In part thanks to RoR, I'm sure! Wouldn't mind using it for front-end but all that stuff is so interchangeable, the syntax diffs are barely noticed in the development process. I think really the only front-end techs with noticeable differences in feel are the ones with advanced data-binding/component libraries.

Maybe there are some mind-blowing gems out there now though? Who knows....

0 comments

MichaelGG11y ago

The main benefit of Ruby seems to be the ability to catch method names and treat them as an argument. I bought "Metaprogramming in Ruby", and the author seems delighted that you can do "mycvsrow.columnname". Several other people have confirmed to me that it is really just being able to drop off quotes around what would otherwise be strings in other languages. I don't get it, at all. Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction to verbose languages like Java. But I fail to see what Ruby offers over a Haskell or F#-like.

I got excited by seeing how passionate and excited people like patio11 were about Rails. But then seeing how Rails prefers insecure defaults and had exploits because they were essentially eval'ing user posted data really hampered my enthusiasm.

Seeing articles like this reinforces the idea that Ruby is cowboy programming, just making stuff up as they go along. Like PHP but with class.

abroncs11y ago

Although I agree with what you are saying, this is hardly new. (And still disappointing IMO).

Developers in the RoR community have a tendency to say that "Rails is very good for one set of problems (Basecamp), and using it for anything else is problematic". This has been the answer for every attempt that tried to introduce some worthwhile idea to the Ruby community, be it OO design, TDD or something more "enterprisey" like hexagonal architecture. It's not the Rails Way™, move on.

I've heard developers whom I respect (ie. Avdi Grimm, Sandi Metz) shrug this inherent limitation of Rails off, and I find it really weird. It's akin to Stockholm syndrome really.

dankohn111y ago

You are ignoring a decade of history in declaring Rails to be "dangerous for enterprise use". The reality is that Rails apps are used in thousands of enterprises around the world, as well as in "web-scale" businesses like Github, Airbnb, and Groupon.

However, Rails (and specifically ActiveRecord) has a very specific design philosophy (see http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm... ) which does not include support for stored procedures (because business logic belongs in the app, not the database).

Of course, there are ways to make stored procedures work with Rails (see https://github.com/leopoldodonnell/uses-stored-procedures ) but they are likely to end in tears, since you are working against the grain of the framework.

The basic argument for Rails is not about support for or against any specific underlying technology (if you can reach Facebook-scale on PHP, then you can make anything work), it is that using a mature and well-crafted framework maximizes developer productivity.

For most startups, as well as most enterprises, that is the critical resource.

foobarian11y ago

The "enterprise" I work at uses a dozen little RoR apps to put a quick and dirty UI on some DB tables so analysts/sales/support folks can interact with the data.

The main problem with Ruby in this kind of setting is that these internal tools are extremely hard to maintain because of backwards compatibility issues--which there are plenty due to lack of spec, organic language development etc. The effort to upgrade the Ruby version is much greater than doing incremental hacks to support some half-day feature, so the codebase stays pinned to the 2007 Ruby release, we can't use new gems, have to live with old bugs or missing features, etc. And with every new incremental change the project gets harder to upgrade.

The Java ecosystem has done a lot better in this regard. Scala is not very good either, we have had a couple Scala projects with version lock-in effect as well.

marktangotango11y ago

This is the longterm perspective thats rarely seen here, thank you.

fat0wlOP11y ago

hi dan,

i apologize, i must have been unclear because it seems that you (& some of the commenters below) are dissecting some of my statements quite literally whereas i put a lot of disclaimery type of statements to try to indicate that this is a combo of personal opinion / hazy memory (if the commenter below ever sees this he can also now receive my apology about mentioning datamapper as an ORM gaining traction, that must be a memory from years ago when i still did RoR). :D

I am aware that RoR has been successfully adopted many places, but i guess part of what i failed to explain here (that thankfully foobarian touches upon a bit) is that i believe that part of the power of "a spec" in a programming context is to maintain a solid core of functionality, that then also paves the way for expanded functionality in the future based on extensions of a similar style of syntax.

I know Ruby & Rails teams are not one and the same, I just have many memories of experiences in that community where library evolution is not incremental, does not expand functionality, deprecates as a rival lib rises in popularity.

In Java you see 2 things -- slow spec evolution & incremental expansion of features. It takes time (I know the fast-moving lang communities hate this) but I find it makes for much more robust codebases that survive upgrade processes with wayyyyyy less re-factoring/re-writing, and in type even some libraries that had their own syntax start to embrace/support the spec (Hibernate implements JPA now...).

So.... I suppose, yes, it is a personal matter perhaps. Some companies have used Rails successfully. But in freelance it has kindof bitten me (the overhead of dealing with security vulnerabilities / gem upgrades alone is astronomically more than I've dealt with in upgrading Java projects). I understand that a competent team can handle this & enterprises can pour money into making it work, but as a programmer who often works alone & hates forced unplanned maintenance, it is a tough pill to swallow.

Also, maybe it is because I am dealing with a lot of enterprise/legacy code at times. Sure, maybe business logic shouldn't go in the database. But if someone supplies me a library of highly complex Oracle functions & tells me i need to wrap these into services ASAP, am I really going to begin an immediate re-write? I would prefer that my framework is just able to wrap these functions until a re-write can be scheduled (if the codebase isn't retired before then...). Also in the enterprise community I don't find as much of a desire to have ALL logic in the app layer... often devs feel that as long as a stored procedure / view / whatever returns a meaningful coherent entity that is useful in the business logic layer, they don't really care where/how the query was aggregated.

I also understand anything can be made to scale & work for an enterprise... but it takes enterprise-level support!! I am more a champion of the rogue programmer trying to build an enterprise with a few lines of code a day. ;)

Best, john

Doctor_Fegg11y ago

DataMapper isn't gaining traction, sadly. v1 is abandonware, v2 forked off to become a different project called ROM (which explicitly "isn't an ORM"). I still use DataMapper v1 because I find it a thousand times nicer than ActiveRecord, but it's a minority taste.

MBCook11y ago

That sounds like a philosophy of RoR, not Ruby. How would adopting RubySpec help with that?

atmosx11y ago

The author claims that he is a professional developer, while bashing at a programming language (Ruby) because he wanted more abilities from an ORM (AR) of a web framework (Rails).

He thinks that DattaMapper is trending, when it's clearly not(!!) and doesn't know Sequel (another popular actively developed ruby ORM). Hence it's easy to deduce that he doesn't have a clue about the landscape he is talking about.

Yet he is bashing Ruby as if it's hard to write a module with a couple of complex, custom-made raw SQL queries.

... blah! ...

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