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[Rant] @#$% Rails

March 6th, 2008 by masukomi

Rails:

I was all happy to get a chance to code something in Rails at work. Just a throw-away prototype, and then it came time to deploy it. God I hate you Rails. You’re a freaking clit-tease. You’re all “come on baby…don’t you want to be productive? Think of how fast you and I can built your hot app…” The next morning, when it comes time to deploy, you hear laughter fading down the hallway from some 500lb lady with strangely oozing bits who looked much more attractive when you were drinking the good shit last night. You clean yourself vigorously, get the thing deployed after much frustration (and never well on a shared server), and then find out that it’s runs slower than frozen dog shit if you don’t give it injections of fast-cgi, mongrel, and any other uppers you have lying around.

After fighting with it for hours, giving up on Mongrel working (yes i’ve gotten it working many times before), and having to hack the Rails source to make it boot even Webrick, I realized that for a simplistic app I could have written it in just as much time in Smalltalk with Seaside, and had it deployed in about 5 minutes. Smalltalk I say! I’m not dissing Smalltalk, but it’s not like the world is jumping up and down to make Smalltalk deployment easy. Rails on the other hand has thousands upon thousands of people trying to get it running, many for businesses, and each needs to go jiggery-poking it with pound, or Nginx, or mod_proxy, or fast-cgi, or anything they can fucking think of just to make it usable. Even then it’s laughable the amount of hardware you have to throw at it for a site like Twitter.

So, yeah. Rails can bite my shiny white ass. I’m incredibly grateful that they revolutionized the web development landscape but their intolerance towards anything the core Rails devs. don’t happen to need (legacy databases anyone?), the blinders they’re wearing when it comes to scaleability, and the bullshit you have to go through to get it deployed result in me giving it the finger. I still don’t think Java’s a fun language but one thing you can say about it is that deploying Java webapps is freaking easy, hell, distributing them isn’t even that hard. Even the ThoughtWorks guys decided it’d be much easier for their customers to deploy Mingle (a Rails app) under the JVM with JRuby, and that’s just sad.

P.S. Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to replace the really nice photos on the Mongrel web site with a drawing of a drowning dog ?! “Yes please! I wanna install the drowning dog software!” OMFG people!

P.P.S For those who keep not getting it: Rails != Ruby. Ruby rocks, even if it is slow.

P.P.P.S. Yes, I realize something was @#$% in my ruby+gems+whateverthefuck installation and that it’s not specifically Rails fault, but it’s a pain in the ass to deploy for production even when all the stars are aligned.