rails won [03/20/2009 06:04:48]
My friend Zach has this old ASP site over at bodyblog.com. Back in the day, it was a pretty active community of bodybuilders and regular people just getting in shape.
A couple months ago, I agreed to help him dust it off and get it working again, and since the code was pretty bad and ASP is a dead technology (replaced by ASP.net), I advised him to port it to a newer technology.
Then the question was, which one? I've been tinkering with my own little python web framework for years now, and while I'm proud of it, I couldn't in good conscience advise Zach to build his business around it.
If you're building a business you want something approaching an industry standard, because the more people working on and with a technology, the more developers you have available to hire, and the more tools they have to help them work faster.
Java and ASP.net were certainly viable options, but given my own areas of expertise, and the fact that I'd be doing most of the work, it came down to three choices:
- drupal
- django
- rails
Of the three, I had extensive experience with drupal, no experience with django (but over a decade of python experience) and only a vague familiarity with rails (having worked through a book a couple years ago and not touching it since)
It wasn't much of a contest.
Drupal is impressive, but it's a case of bright people making the best of a pretty clunky technology (PHP).
Django is... Well, it's written in python, lots of people seem to like it, and I can't think of one bad thing to say about it. Django is OK.
Rails, on the other hand... Rails sucks. In fact, rails sucks hard. The Railiens make a big fuss about favoring convention over configuration, and of course they picked the most bone-headed, moronic conventions imaginable, like coupling data objects to the database, using pluralized table names, and... and...
And none of those choices make the slightest bit of difference in the long run.
Rails is something people either love or hate with a passion. It has a personality. It's opinionated software, as they say, and it turns out that was a pretty brilliant marketing move.
A year or two when I worked through that rails book, the system I saw left me wondering "so what?" But what rails has going for it is a network effect. It drew in this core of very passionate users (especially corporate users) and they contributed their passion, and their resources, and it just kept growing.
We picked rails because it's reached its tipping point. The industry is behind it, there's a huge freelance developer population, and there's plenty of really great tool support.
Once I got past the culture shock and accepted that the conventions are just a matter of taste, and once I got past all the hassles of installing and configuring the dang thing (I finally gave up trying to get ruby talking to MySQL on my home windows box and just moved everything over to linux) I noticed that I was actually getting a hell of a lot done in not much time at all.
For the longest time, I held on to this idea that I could become some kind of tech leader. Some kind of Prometheus complex, maybe: part of me really wanted to be the one stealing fire from the gods and leading everyone into enlightenment.
But for the past few months... I dunno. I just don't care about that anymore. I don't feel like I have to leave my mark on the world. At least, not as a web framework developer.
So yeah. Long story short: rails won.