To me it's mostly about the Open Source culture: Not only Rails, but
the entire stack as many have pointed out. Open source is not only
about free (as in beer), but the freedom to do whatever the heck you
want with it - for instance, deploy on nginx with mongrel, or thin, or
passenger, under any number of VMs and OSes, as well as databases.
This is the kind of freedom you get on an open source environment,
much unlike Microsoft. By using .Net MVC, not only are you locking
your "VM" to the .Net framework (not sure if Mono is a viable option),
but also you would have to deploy on the windows stack, and get ready
to pay for licensing fees for both Windows Server and SQL Server. It
does add up, especially if/when you scale horizontally. Be sure to
bring this up when they make the point the MS .Net MVC was recently
open sourced.
The Rails community has lead the path in web development industry with
practices like TDD and BDD, DRY, YAGNI, convention over configuration,
full integration with javascript frameworks enabling the use of Ajax,
etc. These are certainly possible and encouraged by other frameworks,
but Rails lead that path and made it real and tangible.
Finally, Ruby is just a joy to work with. I firmly believe that it
helps developers write shippable code faster, and with less bugs.
Blocks and procs make life more enjoyable. Not having to write BS code
to simply call something on each element of an array, by example, just
talks for itself:
Here's a brief example:
for (int i = 0; i < my_array.length; i++) {
my_array[i].something()
}
Or:
my_array.map(&:something)
Same goes with the dynamic nature of the language and how it makes
meta-programming accessible...
The bottom line is that by using Ruby (and Rails), you will most
likely be able to develop new features quicker, you and your team will
be happier, and you'll have a broader set of deployment options for
your apps. What's most important for the business is getting features
out the door, with as few bugs as possible, and being able to maintain
them throughout the life cycle of the product. In this sense, Rails
delivers.
Good luck,
-H
On Apr 3, 5:18 pm, Mark Turner <m...@amerine.net> wrote:
> On Apr 3, 12:04 pm, Chris Johnson <ch...@johnsonch.com> wrote:
>
> > I have been put in a tough situation at work. I have been developing rails
> > applications for the past 2 years and thoroughly enjoy what I am doing.
> > However it has been bestowed upon me to give an objective summary leading to
> > the benefits of rails versus using Microsoft's MVC capabilities.
>
> > I have been going back and forth with colleges on this and everyone has a
> > response to how "their" technology is better. I am looking for some other
> > ideas / reasons why you people in the community like rails as a way to
> > gather more evidence of to why we should use rails in an "enterprise" (the
> > buzz word everyone around here uses) environment.
>
> > Any opinions are greatly welcomed. I love rails and dont want to go down
> > with out a fight but need some good ammo and am looking for the community
> > for advice as a way to answer the question "Why is Rails better"?
>
> You could throw all sorts of reasons at their feet and I still worry
> that for the most part it would be falling on deaf ears. There have
> been countless time I have heard people completely throw any non-
> Microsoft, IBM or HP solution out the door because of some pre-
> existing ideals they have. Its way less common today but still very
> prevalent.
>
> Rails is a mature framework, ruby is a fantastic language but for the
> most part it still expects you to have a clue about what you're doing.
> It takes a few hats to be able to develop, test and host a rails app.
> In the .net world everything (mostly) is going to be hosted/done
> Microsoft's way... its hard to fight a fight like this if you are the
> only one fighting for rails, phb's want to be able to fire you and
> call Microsoft when they need help. To be honest I would assume that
> someone in a leadership position over a developer using rails would
> have seen value in it by now, which leads me to think that the boss
> has no clue and is easily swayed by any marketing documents. Rails is
> very opinionated and has choice some positions on things that not
> everyone else agrees with, and the beauty of that is people were
> passionate enough to go out and create their own frameworks instead of
> accepting what the core team decides.
>
> Like I said, Rails is a mature well supported framework for developing
> web applications. Ruby if a great language and has only gotten better
> since a large group of developers started to use it when the moved to
> rails. Rails is open & ruby is open you have a choice when it comes to
> runtimes and hosting environments. If you get into metaprogramming and
> then try some of the fantastic things you're able to do in ruby with a
> language like c# you're going to be disappointed.
>
> Ultimately I would say that it comes down to you, what do you want to
> do? If your happy with rails why stick around a shop that's not?
>
> To sum it up:
> Rails...
> * $0 licensing cost to deploy, build and maintain rails apps, this can
> change of course if you decide to use certain OS's, databases, IDE's
> etc. But if you have a computer and an internet connection.. thats all
> you need.
> * Rails has a large community of active developers that you can rely
> on for support.
> * Rails will have better documentation for quite a while.
> * Rails/Ruby are mature.
> * Routing is easier and cleaner
> * Choice of free testing frameworks with great documentation is much
> broader.
>
> Cheers,
> -Mark Turner
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