Do everything in Java…

[Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d]

On 2014-12-21 20:37, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:

> 1) versions don't match. Stuff like rvm and bundler can mitigate this,

I'm not exactly sure what you're meaning but using Rails without bundler 
is just mad.

> but they don't help searching the web. Find a technique and try it...
> but it requires Rails 2.17 and the app depends in 2.15 or something
> stupid like that. I guess you can't blame them for adding new features,
> but I do wish the documentation for old versions was always easy to get
> to and always easily labeled so it would be obvious. (D could do this too!)

This page [1] contains documentation for Rails, for 4.1.x, 4.0.x, 3.2.x 
and 2.3.x. It's basically the latest version of a given branch. This 
page [2] contains the API reference for Rails, it's not easy to find but 
you can append "vX.Y.Z" to that URL to get a specific version.

> 2) SSL/TLS just seems to randomly fail in applications and the tools
> like gem and bundle. Even updating the certificates on the system didn't
> help most recently, I also had to set an environment variable, which
> seems just strange.

I think I have seen that once or twice when upgrading to a new version 
of OS X. But that's usually because your gems and other software is 
still built for the older version. I can't recall seeing this for a new 
project.

> 3) Setting up the default WEBrick isn't too bad, but making it work on a
> production system (like apache passenger) has been giving us trouble.
> Got it working for the most part pretty fast, but then adding more stuff
> became a painful config nightmare. This might be the application (based
> on Rails 2 btw) more than the platform in general, but it still irked me.

I haven't been too involved in that part. I have set up one or two apps 
with passenger and it was pretty easy to just follow the installation. 
Although, that wasn't production servers.

> 4) It is abysmally slow, every little thing takes forever. DB changes,
> slow. Asset recompiles: slow. Tests: slow. Restarting the server: slow.
> The app itself: slow. I'm told Ruby on the JVM is faster though :)

Yeah, that's one major issue. It can be very, very slow. But I also 
think it's too easy code slow with something like ActiveRecord. It's 
easy to forget it's actual a database behind it.

> My main problems with ruby on rails though are bad decisions and just
> underwhelming aspect of actually using it. Everyone sells it as being
> the best thing ever and so fast to develop against but I've seen better
> like everything. Maybe it was cool in 2005 (if you could actually get it
> running then...), but not so much anymore.

I find it difficult to find something better. I think that's mostly 
because of the existing ecosystem with plugins and libraries available. 
I feel the same thing with D vs Ruby. At some point I just get tired 
with developing my own libraries and just want to get something done.

[1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
[2] http://api.rubyonrails.org

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg