Somebody needs to embrace Buddha.

Rather than take the time to embrace Buddha and learn all the ins and outs of his teachings, I’ll just start a 12 step program entitled “How Not To Be A Ruby on Rails Fanboi”.

Again, I’m not dissing Rails. This community just seems to vibrate with excitement over relatively small happenings. I suppose that they feel like they are changing the face of web development, and I can’t disagree with that feeling.

Thank you for this. Ruby is great stuff. It is what enables reasonably clever people to gather up good ideas from other places and collect them in Rails, improving their ease of use along the way.

But, alas, the Rails hype machine largely targets (or is mostly successful with) the many who have never or rarely written a Web app before. Everything therefore seems miraculous and special, as if everything Good and Cool sprung from David Hanson’s mind ready-formed.

(DHH himself does not clam this, but he certainly encourages and engages in the general frothing. )

Rails is really, really good for the old-school, MVC-style Web apps many people still want to write. Despite the attempts to hitch it to Web 2.0 buzz, it does not really encourge the development following more modern architectures better suited for where the Web is really headed.

I feel like I might be taking the bait here, but what are non-old-school, non-MVC-style apps using these days? What are the more modern architectures that are better suited? (and no I’m not being a wiseass, I’m wondering to what you’re referring).

And as for the hype, yeah it’s a bit much to swallow often, but has reallly helped gain attention to Rails which has catapulted it over lots of competing projects real fast. It’s got “real” books coming out and all… (as compared to the docs of most projects, which leave, uh a bit lacking…)

I am interested to know what Thomas was referring to also. The hype, however, I can live without. Make a raucous when you do something truly revolutionary… or hell, even Evolutionary. Getting rid of XML and providing a near-zero configuration ORM doesn’t give me the hard on it gives other people. Especially when Ruby lacks alot of libraries I would need (pgp encryption, charting, etc).

Agreed, my eyes roll often in conjunction with some of the screaming and cheering. But after dabbling in other similar projects, specifically in python, and never seeing user populations get bigger than a handful of people (and there are still many more python users than ruby), I think overall it may be a worthy tradeoff.

After a while alternatives will sprout up, as others feel the same. Another good side effect of all the noise — Dreamhost (large hosting provider) recently added FastCGI support for running Rails. Which benefits people who want to use other ruby libs, python, perl, etc. So there are good things from the sometimes ridiculous hype. That’s how I see it at least.

I guess Thomas ws thinking of app frameworks with builtin flow control such as Seaside2 or UCW

I think Thomas Joad was probably using the term MVC incorrectly and may have instead ment new architectures relating to the View+Controller part of the MVC model. Such architectures like Wicket for example, that use Tapestry syle HTML id’s to inject logic into the view, while having the component model of frameworks like Echo. Maybe in general he was talking about component based architectures? I don’t know… I’m a Rails user, but in the Java world, Wicket is making my life alot more productive and fun. Yes I’m a Wicket fanboi. -strips naked and runs around the room wildly- Wooo!

” It’s a cool feature, but these features are relatively easy to add to anything. “

So what commercial web-applications have these easy to add features?

No matter how many sites you list, the answer is “not many.”

Maybe if you made a great site with some easy to add but as of yet rarely implemented UI tricks, we’d all be drooling over you.

Your criticism has nothing to do with the topic at hand: Lets not sacrifice our virgins at the alter of RoR just because it’s champions added a clever feature.

The fact that 37signals can implement such a feature speedily proves that they are an agile, responsive shop. That’s something I would agree with all day long. I use ta-da list for cryin’ out loud.

What I don’t like to see is a cadre of ruby fanbois patting their collective backs because one shop can be speedy. For every Basecamp, there are STILL 10 crappy ones, just like every other language.

If you read my comment as a criticism of 37signal’s work, you are mistaken or I am a poor writer. Probably the latter. The point is that a single victory makes not a revolution.