----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "mod_perl List" <modperl@perl.apache.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 6:26 PM
Subject: Re: [OT] modperl vs. Ruby
there's been a popular link critiquing rails floating around
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.309321.3
personally, I hate rails. i'm seeing a lot of colleagues adopt it,
with a combination of this reasoning:
it 'sucks less than php' ( from someone with a php book )
its perfect for doing small sites regardless of traffic
remember, there are 2 types of scaling :
a- lots of users / content
b- lots of hits
rails can scale on b reasonably well behind lighty w/fcgi. just
loadbalance and toss server after server into a cluster.
the bulk of its use is design shop stuff
but all my colleagues/friends work for design shops
not to knock rails, but the biggest project they've been implemented
with , as far as i can tell, is odeo. lots of other projects are done
in it, but none that scale in use and content like that one, and it
doesn't really impress me. there could be something else out there,
but i've yet to see it. all the projects i've seen done on it are
blogs, small sharing apps, design agency stuff, etc. it does that
stuff really well and really fast, but there's no breadth to it.
AFAIK the big blog implementation service that touts rails is run as
multiple installations each behind their own lighty instance with
fcgi support.
this fall, I quit my FT job to start an online sharing / syndication
service that will hopefully go live within the month.
i evaluated a ton of frameworks and languages, here's how i felt:
ruby - rails was getting all the hype. i tried rails and had a
webapp running in minutes. it was a sheer pleasure as promised.
except rails couldn't do what i wanted to do for my project. it was
way to strict. its made for building a certain type of application -
not every application.
c - would have been the fastest to run and scale the best.
nightmare to write.
php - i found it a nightmare to maintain code and enforce MVC, and i
intensely dislike the model of everything essentially being a cgi
script. i wanted everything compiled into the server, as i'm running
a single service, not 20 differentn projects for 20 clients like I
managed at my old design agency.
python - the spec on the twisted framework kept changing. django
was too Rail's-ish in scope. turbogears didn't exist yet, but also a
bit too rails-ish for me.
perl - i don't like template toolkit or mason. i know many do. i
just don't. they're both very perlish in the templates. catalyst
wasn't really around yet - maypole was, but also too rails ish.
i ended up building my own MVC 'framework' under mp2. i get all the
speed and server integration that I wanted. i'm tossing framework
in quotes, because everything is too built-into my app. i'd love to
pull it out and release it, but its not there yet. it basically just
does url dispatching to perl modules + session control in a
standardized manner, and has an abstracted api for content
rendering. all html pages are written TAL, because I use python
to prototype objects and methods and handle admin tasks. this lets
me use the same exact templates for prototyping. one might think
that perl or ruby is fast/easy to write - well (for me)python is a
fraction of it -- and program/test in python than port to mod_perl is
way faster (again for me than ) doing everything in mod_perl.
i think the reasons why rails gets so much hype are this:
it makes building a certain type of project easy. those projects
are 'popular' as are the companies building them. so when people
talk about it, others listen.
its gaining a lot of ground w/newcomers to web building, as its easy
and intuitive. so more people talk about it.
it converts a lot of people from .NET or java, who hear the hype and
give it a shot. truth be told, they find it a dream. who wouldn't
after that conversion?
so depending on what you're building, RoR may be the best framework
for you, or a complete nightmare. its certainly not the jack-of-all-
trades, and neither is catalyst. using any framework or language,
your milage WILL vary compared to others.
On Feb 25, 2006, at 5:23 PM, Mark Galbreath wrote:
which then begs the question, why RoR and not Catalyst?
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