A recent confession by Piotr Solnica started another bit of drama in the Ruby world. I started writing this post just after reading Fabio Akita’s response to Piotr’s post - for me it shows all the problems with Rails’ defensive mindset, but it also reminded me that Rails is still a pretty cool framework. Feel confused? Let’s solve that.
The reality is that 80% of the web applications are Basecamp-like (disclosure: my feelings for years of experience in consulting).
That statement amuses me because my experience is completely different. I just started working on an application which really fits into the Rails Way - but it’s the first time that I’ve felt this after four years with Rails and Monterail. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a sign that there is huge market for both - Basecamp-like and non-Basecamp-like applications and you can find customers looking for each.
Active Record’s architecture will indeed hurt hard maybe 10% of the cases out there.
Rails is a really sharp knife for prototyping. For such (and simple CRUD applications), the quoted statement is true - ActiveRecord could be a problem for just a few prototyping cases.
The reality is that, well, a lot of customers don’t understand that a prototype is not an MVP. After all the years with Rails, we all have some experience working with legacy Rails applications. Some agencies even specialize in fixing your legacy code, because it’s really hard to deal with a framework that is designed to encourage a monolith which can make things more difficult in the long run.
If you are happy to make your business as successful as GitHub or Twitter, you can invest into hacking around the framework or rewrite some parts into a different technology. But in most cases, you would only suffer to introduce new features, maintain existing ones and fight with the temptation to rewrite everything from scratch.
That’s why so many long timers have switched somewhere else. Most of them silently or without loud complaints of Rails. Others have tried to hack around or have started creating an alternative.
#ruby/rails #development #github
