Chillmoz

Trade-Offs in Using Rails

Notice that I talk about Rails like it’s my best friend. But really, rails isn’t yet. It’s like a newfound friend that I have to test to see if it can withstand my eccentricity.

Lately, I’ve read that Twitter is abandoning rails. Most developers say the flaw is not in rails but on the application’s architecture. But some developers say that rails has scalability problems. Some Pinoy ASP users even suggest Twitter to switch to ASP.net’s MVC because it’s better. They can come up with so many conclusions out of one premise. Amazing… .

How does this news affect developers like myself? Well for rails testers ( who more or less are ambitious developers), I want to know as early as possible if rails is the right framework for big projects. Now that I know the concept of MVC, I think it wouldn’t be so difficult for me to learn Symfony framework which Erica suggested. I’ve also played around with PHP for some time and I think that the only annoying thing about it is the fact that you have to repeat code in so many places. The earliest implementations of AJAX and PHP for basic form validation for instance is hell annoying. Of course, if you build in a framework like symfony, these tasks wouldn’t even feel like tasks. I respect the idea of brevity and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) I’m sure rails developers who HAML do too.

So far, rails is cool for me. It’s a framework that transforms designers into good developers and developers into good designers. But it has its trade-offs. First trade-off is that rails is not as easy to deploy as PHP apps and I’m not only talking about one-click installs from your cpanel like Wordpress but practically everything written in PHP can be easily deployed . Rails, however, requires Capistrano to automate the deployment of applications. Rails can run with FastCGI on Site5 and Dreamhost shared hosting, but the app can perform better with Mongrel. This also leads to some COST problems. I decided recently to get VPS hosting at Slicehost as soon as I come up with something tangible in rails for an important project. Conclusively, a rails app is more difficut to maintain and manage than those built in PHP-based frameworks. As another developer has told me before, he doesn’t even want to try out rails because it makes use of so many resources. People who’ve seen these problems have made a business out of it like Morph Labs, Inc., a Philippine-based “Web 2.0″ Technology company.

Enough said, I have to learn how to allow multiple registration forms in Rails. I would still implement a basic user authetication system for two types of members, but as to registration, there should be two forms for two different membership types. This is something I need to learn for at least one project.

It is difficult for me to find out how until I map everything out to see the whole plan. So far, I haven’t seen a single rails site that implements this concept. It’s not about dogs and cats really, but more about buyers and sellers, fans and artists etcetera etcetera.

Tags: Capistrano, HAML, Rails, Software Development, TechNews
Posted in Everyday Code Work, Rails, TechNews, Web 2.0 · May 9th, 2008 · Comments (1)