Rails 3.0 Released 110
An anonymous reader writes "After two years of gestation, 4 betas, 2 release candidates and thousands of commits by 1600+ contributors, the result of the succesful merge of the Merb and Rails frameworks (and teams) is now out and ready to transport your web applications on all new shiny tracks."
Re:It's a nice framework (Score:2, Insightful)
But I do wish the community would grow up.
But from my experience, I think the community is already big and grown up enough to base your serious application on Rails.
No, not grown up as in scale (*ahem* twitter, twitter) but grown up as in *not* arrogant ranting pricks.
Re:It's a nice framework (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a nice framework (Score:5, Insightful)
This is something I wrote a while back: These are not the actions of people who care about writing the best code possible, these are the actions of people with egos chasing features and attention. [slashdot.org]
I haven't kept up with Rails development, precisely due to attitudes like these, but hopefully the injection of Merb will bring with it an injection of - yes I'll say that word - professionalism.
Re:It's a nice framework (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not the parent; but statements to the effect by 37 Signals that they "don't hire people unless they use a Mac" probably have a lot to do with this.
That immediately alienated what, 90, 85 percent? I forget the market share stats; but it alienated a lot of people. Yeah, I really want to spend extra money for a proprietary white box so I can be cool like you.
Even if it weren't for the 'tude; I still wouldn't be interested. You pay a high performance price for the dynamic nature of Ruby whether you need it or not. It just doesn't seem like that great an idea. Combine that with the "tragicly hip" air of the community, and a lot of people find themselves just wishing Rails/Ruby would go away.
Community issues (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a long-time Rails user - Started playing with it before 1.0, and have applications in production since the 1.1 days.
Rails is _great_, and it helps lots to productivity. However, its community is too young - the whole "latest version or deep-fried" attitude really hurts.
A community of assorted modules' authors has sprung around Rails and its Agile practices, which is good. However, most of those modules (gems) have (contrary to Rails, which at last has grown and is a mature project by now) very unsound practices - Say, API-incompatible changes in minor versions, or announcing major versions every month or two. And then telling you that via Gems you can keep several co-installed version. Oh, but please, do not bother them to fix bugs in older versions. Or gems adding other gems as dependencies, even when said gems are nowhere near production quality.
I maintaining for Debian several Ruby modules. And believe me, while I try to do a decent job, it gets harder, and I have ended up maintaining a lot of crappy modules that were at some point dependencies... Or the "flavor of the day" which was superseded by a new, "faster, DRYer, nicer, better!" implementation... which gradually builds up cruft and gets replaced as well.
Re:It's a nice framework (Score:3, Insightful)
37signals is a business. They do Mac-based development. Not hiring people that don't use Macs may not be the best business decision (simple litmus tests usually aren't), but its not an insane one, to be sure, and it has just about nothing to do with Rails, since even though there are personnel overlaps between Rails and 37signals, the two aren't the same thing.
Unless you are looking for a job with 37signals, I don't see how their preference for hiring Mac users affects you at all. And making something a job qualification isn't the same as making it part of the definition of "cool".
That's a legitimate concern, though there are good reasons that performance of the runtime isn't the overwhelming concern when choosing a platform for a project, but the speed with which something can be developed, tested, and deployed is more critical, and the Ruby ecosystem and Rails have features that lots of people find attractive in that direction.
AFAICT, the "tragicly hip" air of "the community" is something that exists largely in the minds of people who have minimal if any active contact with either the Rails community or the broader Ruby community (often, people who fail to recognize that the two groups are distinct), and who therefore see only the interactions in the community that create controversies visible outside of the community.