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Programming

Ruby on Rails Creator Touts 7.0 as One-Person Framework, 'The Way It Used To Be' (hey.com) 62

Posted by EditorDavid from the individual-generalists dept.
David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails (as well as the co-founder and CTO of Basecamp, makers of the email software HEY). But he says Wednesday's release of version 7.0 is the version he's been longing for, "The one where all the cards are on the table. No more tricks up our sleeves. The culmination of years of progress on five different fronts at once." The backend gets some really nice upgrades, especially with the encryption work that we did for HEY, so your data can be encrypted while its live in the database.... But it's on the front end things have made a quantum leap. We've integrated the Hotwire frameworks of Stimulus and Turbo directly as the new defaults, together with that hot newness of import maps, which means you no longer need to run the whole JavaScript ecosystem enchilada in your Ruby app...

The part that really excites me about this version, though, is how much closer it brings us to the ideal of The One Person Framework. A toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which they might build a competitive business. The way it used to be... Rails 7 seeks to be the wormhole that folds the time-learning-shipping-continuum, and allows you to travel grand distances without knowing all the physics of interstellar travel. Giving the individual rebel a fighting chance against The Empire....

The key engine powering this assault is conceptual compression. Like a video codec that throws away irrelevant details such that you might download the film in real-time rather than buffer for an hour. I dedicated an entire RailsConf keynote to the idea...

[I]f there ever was an opening, ever was a chance that we might at least tilt the direction of the industry, now is it.

What a glorious time to be working in web development.
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Ruby on Rails Creator Touts 7.0 as One-Person Framework, 'The Way It Used To Be' More

Ruby on Rails Creator Touts 7.0 as One-Person Framework, 'The Way It Used To Be'

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  • Glorious time? (Score:4, Informative)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @05:08PM (#62097853)

    Naa, web development used to be shitty and low paid, is shitty and low paid and will be shitty and low paid. Better go into a different specialty. Basically anything else is better.

    • Your comment is weird to me cause I know a ton of people working on websites for over 200k a year.

      Thing is these days web development encompasses APIs, login systems (SSO), payment gateways, and a ton of other stuff going over HTTP

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Only the HTML/CSS and design side. Web applications, which this is for, is well paid. These days web apps are the most common interface to databases, and a lot of companies use web apps where they would previously have used in-house native apps.

  • The way it used to be... Rails 7 seeks to be the wormhole that folds the time-learning-shipping-continuum, and allows you to travel grand distances without knowing all the physics of interstellar travel. Giving the individual rebel a fighting chance against The Empire....

    And It'll cure your asthma too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    Seriously, TFA gives me no idea about the technical merit of Rails 7, but this guy needs to lay down the coffee mug for a minute and get some fresh air.

    • The way it used to be... Rails 7 seeks to be the wormhole that folds the time-learning-shipping-continuum, and allows you to travel grand distances without knowing all the physics of interstellar travel. Giving the individual rebel a fighting chance against The Empire....

      And It'll cure your asthma too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      Seriously, TFA gives me no idea about the technical merit of Rails 7, but this guy needs to lay down the coffee mug for a minute and get some fresh air.

      As I've said before in regard to web pages as a whole, you get a nice word salad but no substance. Just spew out techincal or edgy sounding jargon and people will beat a path to your door.

      On a related note, develpers and web "designers" have to justify their existence somehow and what better way than to "develop" a web page full of irrelevant and annoying craptacular "features". Who doesn't like an auto-rotating background picture, dropdwon menus which hog a third of the screen, and, as above, a plethora

  • Looks good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @05:11PM (#62097861) Journal

    I like the approach of doing rendering on the backend, so you only need as little Javascript as possible in the frontend.

    • It was my first framework I learned ~8ish years ago and I love it for this exact reason. I'm am by no means well practiced or professional at programming but the fact that all necessary components are packaged in a framework that can be spun up in an afternoon with a little refresh and some google-fu is amazing. Also because there isn't a requirement for JS (that's on you if you want to use it to make things look pretty), I find it helps with mobile devices and older machines where the browser doesn't hav

  • Glorious eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @05:35PM (#62097909)

    What a glorious time to be working in web development.

    Anybody who knows anything about software quality probably felt a wave of nausea reading this - the same nausea they've been feeling since the late 90's in fact, but stronger.

    Just look at the staggering number of framework names droned out in the blurb: I have no idea what any of them are, but I know what it all is globally: more cruft and more inefficiency piling up on top of an already gigantic mountain of cruft and inefficiency.

    If you think this is great, you mustn't have known anything else but a world of cruft and inefficiency...

    • I don't see any "staggering number of framework names" there. They're just individual components of Rails 7, not frameworks.

    • ...If you think this is great, you mustn't have known anything else but a world of cruft and inefficiency...

      Unsurprisingly, cruft and inefficiency seems to mostly make the world go around. I'm not saying that's a good thing, it's just the way it is.

      Outside of the world of web development, it's not like there's not a world of cruft and inefficiency, entire operating systems run on it.

      Mostly, web development mirrors other software development, it's just a lot more vocal and a lot more visible - and just happens to be an easy entry point.
      You can throw your ugly creation, your bastard child, in front of the world an

      • I went from web development (when I was 15) to statically typed, TDD, in a tight CI process (at 34) but it's still web development in PHP.

        It usually takes me a quarter of the time to stand something up than the typical Java, python, or Ruby cheerleader on here.

        All I can think when I'm in the comments here is "go home old man".

        • I went from web development (when I was 15) to statically typed, TDD, in a tight CI process (at 34) but it's still web development in PHP.

          It usually takes me a quarter of the time to stand something up than the typical Java, python, or Ruby cheerleader on here.

          All I can think when I'm in the comments here is "go home old man".

          Sadly, Slashdot does seem to be a realm of cranky old grey beards.
          Hell, I'm an old grey beard myself, 54 next year.
          I've been doing web dev for the better part of 30 years now.

          In my time, I've encountered many cranky old coders. The worst were the old Java devs, who would outright refuse to learn even the basics of the simplest of simple - HTML. They felt it was beneath them. They considered JavaScript and PHP "toy" languages.
          So, I spent a lot of time when I worked with them, fixing the absolute worst HTML y

  • Half of them are def (from being yelled at) and spend most of their time collecting garbage in a dependency monkey patch. I would switch to GoLang.

  • Off the rails. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @06:48PM (#62098065)

    In 40 years, there are going to be a few really high-paid programming positions for people to update large ruby programs that corporations have made but no longer employ people to work on. Ruby is going to be the new COBOL!

    • I thought Oracle was the new COBOL.

    • I had a job 7 years ago to convert a Ruby site to PHP. They are still using my code.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      In 40 years, there are going to be a few really high-paid programming positions for people to update large ruby programs that corporations have made but no longer employ people to work on. Ruby is going to be the new COBOL!

      Ruby never achieved anything like the market share Cobol did, and none of it was in areas where software changes are feared as much as they are in banking and finance.

      • Agreed. I was saying it more to poke fun at it's obvious impending extreme obscurity. Everything ruby will be discarded when the time comes and/or rewritten in something else.

  • In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @07:48PM (#62098181)

    Ruby on Rails Creator Touts 7.0 as One-Person Framework,

    It will be renamed "Ruby on Rail" to highlight the one-person aspect.

  • Web blows (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday December 19, 2021 @10:49PM (#62098511) Journal

    What a glorious time to be working in web development.

    Web development sucks eggs unless you like convoluted minutia. Programmers used to spend about 40% of their time on domain logic, now it's more like 15% because of all the damned layers, dark-grey boxes that half work, and reinventing real GUI's with JavaScript which is not intended a systems language. To keep up with the Jones' you have to throw the entire neighborhood's pets into the mix, and they don't get along.

  • Is exactly the thing that robust applications need. Web developers are constantly spinning their wheels, chasing framework after framework to avoid the overhead of having a proper domain model, using MVC and proven UI patterns to create an application. UI components and a component model? No, we want to reinvent the login screen, menus, credit card entry and so on for every single application we do. After all, busy rework, err... constant UI innovation still pays the bills.

  • It's almost 2022 and Ruby is just now getting some kind of framework. Having looked at Ruby on Rails over 10 years ago, it was clear they were majoring in minors and failing in majors. An ORM that understands major databases out of the box and generated intelligent code isn't an optional thing. If you can't play nicely with existing databases that didn't follow your conventions, you're not going to get very far.

    Writing a framework to reduce the amount of redundant work you do when creating projects is so

    • It's almost 2022 and Ruby is just now getting some kind of framework..

      The framework in question, RubyOnRails, went public in 2004 and has been the #1 framework since that time.

      Having looked at Ruby on Rails over 10 years ago

      I'm thinking, no, you didn't. See above.

      An ORM that understands major databases out of the box and generated intelligent code isn't an optional thing

      That's why Rails was so popular. The ORM.

      You're exceptionally full of shit, even for slashdot.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KalvinB ( 205500 )

        Rails uses ActiveRecord which does a very poor job with existing databases. A proper ORM doesn't need to ask the user anything except what database you want to generate code for. And even that's optional. You can get a list of databases from the database server. Ruby expects you to tell the ORM things it could figure out directly from the database server which doesn't work for large legacy projects. It just wastes an inordinate amount of time.

        • Rails uses ActiveRecord which does a very poor job with existing databases

          You either don't know, or you're lying.

          I was a database consultant during the .com boom. I've been doing databases for a long time. Almost every project I've ever worked on included an RDBMS, at least until the past few years when I've been doing firmware.

          This idea you have is stupid. I mean, really stupid. Over 10 years ago, on old versions of ActiveRecord, I was using it along with stored procedures, rules, views, etc. Weird keys, no problem.

          A proper ORM doesn't need to ask the user anything except what database you want to generate code for

          This claim is not compatible with your first claim.

          Ruby expects you to tell the ORM things it could figure out directly from the database server which doesn't work for large legacy projects

          This is just

  • I just read all the comments on this thread and, sadly (since Slashdot used to have predominately knowledgeable contributors), a good 70 - 80 % seem to know nothing at all about Ruby on Rails (e.g. "it's almost 2022 and Ruby is now just getting some sort of Framework" - oh dear!). The great news here is the reduction of complexity and cruft, not an increase.

    Regards Ruby as a language.. I have tried Go, Rust, Swift, C, C++, Objective C, Python for various purposes and jobs recently and I, for one at least,

    • This seems to have resulted in all the "React" stuff, front end framework bloat and general browser side emphasis for application logic. To my mind it's not the best.

      It may look like framework bloat from the client side, but from a purely computational perspective, the distributed nature of in-browser computing seems a more scalable approach than doing as much as possible on the server.

      • Can't argue with that.

        I would guess my argument would be that clean, efficient, non-bloat frontend frameworks would be good, but so many devs it seems just pile in another framework in order to use 1% of it's functionality and that's where the (some) of the problems lie.

        Be interesting to see what the picture is when comparing the two models, and where the best dividing line might be

    • I still feel like Ruby is the best language for web dev, but rails is really bloated if you use the whole thing. I think it is better to just use the extracted bits, routing, the ORM. And from there, I just use my own db-backed CMS. I'm not even sure what a lot of the bloat is for. Most of it seems to be, "learn Y and Z so you don't have to learn X!" Or, "learn W, X, Y, Z, and OtherThing so your devs don't have to learn the simple, stable underlying technology!" It seems an odd "optimization" of the work fl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leptons ( 891340 )
      Ruby would be great, if it weren't slower than shit sliding uphill.

      • Same as that other popular choice "Python" then ! I use ruby where the speed of the language is not relevant e.g. loading data from remote services into my database. The slow part is retrieving the data over the internet. Speed of the language isn't important. Also, I class web services in that same category (my stuff is pretty low volume at the moment, although I'm quite certain I can scale it if needed). For speed I use (at the moment) native C. Things I do that fall into that category are linear algebra

  • Meanwhile WordPress ... (Score:3)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday December 20, 2021 @09:10AM (#62099207)

    ... has a time-to-market of roughly 30 minutes. Combined with the FOSS metabox.io modeler I can build anything on the fly in a few minutes while editors are already doing data entry. Yes, the app model is crap and was built by people who shouldn't be let near a keyboard, but I have serious doubt the Rails 7 stack with it's bizarre collection of manually handled dependencies is any more efficient and WP comes with react and a drag/drop/point/click pagebuilder by default.

    The valley of efficiency is to deep and long and the destination to far off of any widespread stack for me to care about rails. I'm glad DHH is happy and they've perhaps solved their rails npm-mess, but rails always was and still is an overhyped mess of a toolkit with no real value proposition for me. I'm sticking with LAMP, thank you.

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