Thursday, November 09, 2006

So finally, after trying 'Ruby on Rails' on for size...

I have officially ditched it....

Ruby is arguably the best programming language on the planet right now, superbly crafted, but it can do a great deal better than Rails for a web platform. I gave it a decent try, but too many aspects just do not fit, particularly the templating language. All in all these nuances just seem to be geared to get you up and running as fast as possible, great for beginners, but the minute you look under the hood, you are faced with an increasingly unpleasant picture.

So I am pushing my website Rossputin.org across to Cocoon on my new dedicated server.

Talking to the guys in the Cocoon community, this seems to be the general trend. A brief 'fall in love' with Ruby on Rails, followed by finding a lack in power and in some cases sanity, followed by ultimately returning home to those 'other' frameworks out there.

One to watch out there in my opinion is certainly Wicket.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Count me in as another "loved and left." I've been programming for 30 years; all the way from Assembly to writing my own languages. I had never written a true Web application and have the task of re-writing and combining both internal apps and the existing Web site into a new Web app.

I went looking for the best tool for the job and, after much time, decided on RoR. I was blown away by how much could be down in such a short time.

However, like you, I found that once I got beyond the "wow" factor that what I needed to develop easy to use, scalable desktop-like applications just wasn't there. Or, if it was, I have no idea how to make it work. Documentation is extremely bad, examples are written in a form that only an expert Rubyist could understand and the development tools are non-existent or too buggy to use.

Unfortunately, since I've got to get this out the door, and my shop's experience is in MS (Windows, SQL Server, etc) and Delphi I've gone to ASP.Net/C# to develop this application. I know that Python has been integrated into VS 2005 (IronPython) and I believe the same will happen with a version of Ruby. At that time (with better docs maybe and certainly better development tools) I'll take another look.

Phil Mickelson