Presentation: Why Ruby On Rails?
"Why Ruby On Rails?" was a presentation made by Gregg Pollack at the Orlando Ruby Users Group on March 15, and now you can watch it online. Gregg is a great presenter and moves through a lot of stuff really quickly. The first half of the presentation focuses on agility, agile development, and how agile development changes the way you need to interact with clients, and the second half gets into the technical Rails side of things. A good watch, and especially good to recommend to management types who, perhaps, aren't too familiar with Rails and agility yet.
March 24, 2007 at 8:24 am
One good reason to choose Fortran instead of Rails :) http://clintonforbes.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-does-hot-girl-at-party-think-of.html
March 24, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Summary:
No joy in current
Joy in Ruby
MVC
Oh Look, I can do a find(:all) and it will use introspection to find the records for me..
I mean we don't want to write SQL now do we? Webservers are cheap... Giddy Up Bean Counters... Oh did I mention 5.times {|wank| wank.hard}
hehe
March 24, 2007 at 12:12 pm
P.S. it is 195 megs.. Save yourself the trouble and bandwidth and keep moving folks.. nothing to see here.. If you've seen one Rails evangalizing video, you've seen them all.. Joy, it gives us joy and stuff.. also SQL bad..
March 24, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're on a site that evangelizes Ruby and Rails.
March 24, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I think we need more ASP.NET content on this blog.
March 24, 2007 at 10:45 pm
dude, excuse me if I don't break out into a fawning "ooooh I love it" fest...
I'm here to read about Ruby and yes, it would be great to have more Ruby and Rails screen casts but I find it odd that every single one of those that comes out is always wanting in almost the same ways.. most of them are re-hashes of joy-this productivity-that with"5.time do" thrown in for good measure.
They never talk about any pressing issues and the point of the comment is that DHH's original podcast is enough. Either make an original contribution (and that _may_ mean being critical of something) or at least warn people that this is for absolute beginners (but in that case you'd have to explain why you are "repeating" yourself? )
Ruby has serious performance issues, and most attempts at fixing that are barking up the familiar (to respective developers) trees. Rails deployment is a not exactly a cakewalk as soon as you leave the "blog" pattern.
Now, there are podcasts, but they ask for money for areas which really could use some 'splaining. The other "casts" are just being a bit dis-ingenuous [sp?] when they claim that your productivity is much higher. Yes, developer productivity is much higher but an IT manager (and please don't lecture me on this one, I have probably more experience in it than most weinies who would try to claim up and down the road to the contrary) has to deal with more than the "joy" of relative development team.
making development time shorter at the expense of pain and suffering of the operations people who would have to deal with the product of your "joy" for a couple years at least. You just hit the deployment wall faster. And deployment doesn't mean "CaP deploy". Most rails people disregard the real concerns of operations folks as whining by "the squares" since they are such joyful hippies (or so you're supposed to think).
So, if this is for the "management types" , then come clean and talk about deployment and performance. Because if you don't then you'd be rightly taken to task for being evasive on the issue. And this whole "joy" thing is getting a bit old just for the development types. This has been re-hashed over and over and we don't need another fluffly 'cast about how fast it is to create a blog etc.
Okay, you can now do the fan-boi drive-by thing. But don't just assume that whomever dares to criticize rails is just some java or python guy looking to start a flamewar. I'd say I really love Ruby but it has become such a cliche to say such things that it almost reeks of religious fervor and I hate religiosity with a passion. So I'd just say that if I didn't care, I wouldn't bother posting comments re: pressing issues that _should_ be covered by such films. (I give B+ for effort only, effort but repetitious and misplaced effort) DRY anyone?
March 24, 2007 at 11:16 pm
I converted the video to flash so it's a bit smaller now.
Jeeez.. Some people are a little sour...
The talk that I gave was for people who had never heard of Ruby on Rails before, and most of them had never heard of agile programming either.
I hope you can see that I tried to show "Why" I believe Rails is the best way to go with Web Applications. Rather then just saying "Hey, look at all the cool things I can do in 10 lines of code"... You know what I mean.
Lastly, every programming language has it's deployment issues for different reasons. All new programming languages went through the same thing, where deployment takes a little while to figure out and become easier. Rails is still pretty new.
People love Ruby, people love Rails.. and if you got more then half way through the talk, I think you'll find I explain why this is without showing how quickly I can program a blog. ;-)
It's all about developer happiness.. (as fluffy as that sounds, it's true)
I also think having a more maintainable, flexible, and understandable code base is more important then having a simple deployment/hosting solution. It's just not the hosting solution that makes you successful, it's the website itself.
But I also feel for you. It's often the IT people that aren't appreciated enough. They usually don't get nearly enough props for doing a great job.