Walking into the Light: A Week With Ruby on Rails

This past week or so two developers whom I greatly respect and admire really opened my eyes. It's been an interesting time since then. On October 23 on the Struts Developer list Craig McClanahan wrote:

To which Ted Husted followed up:

Wow! Here are two of the leaders of the Java web development world extolling the virtues of Ruby on Rails. It was an eye opener to me.

I have respected and admired these two guys for years. I've used Struts 1 and 2. I learned Struts 1 from Ted's book. I've worked with Struts 2 for over a year now. Hell, I've bent Struts 2 to my Groovy will with help from the guys on the Struts 2 list. And here they are lauding Ruby on Rails.

Now, personally I've stayed away from Rails. I really didn't want to learn another language, another framework, another set of libraries, another, another, another... Yea, call me lazy, it's a virtue. (cf: man perl)

Well, I'm one week, well really about 12 hours, into playing with RoR, and I'm thoroughly impressed. I keep thinking to myself, "why have I been working so hard all these years?!?!" Where's the XML? Where are the annotations? Where's all the configuration? Where's the struggle to get Spring working with Hibernate/JPA, working with Struts 2? What you mean I don't have to compile, deploy, restart?!?! Huh?

I realize now that I've been trying to do with GroovyWorks what the Rails guys have already accomplished with Ruby. I sort of solved the deploy and restart problem by using Spring/Groovy/Struts2, but what a pain! If I change an interface I have to restart my container.

Now, I'm just at the banging rocks together phase with RoR but I see the promise. I see light and I don't hear any trains. The virtues so far:

• Testing! Yea, I know Java has JUnit, but with RoR it's all there right from the get go. All packaged nicely, with support for unit, functional and integration tests. Integration tests! I love integration tests. I really like to know that everything hangs together the way it's supposed to. Plus, there is explicit and integrated support for fixtures.
• Completeness, it just seems that everything is there, in a logical place.
• Elegance, yes, it is in the eyes of the beholder, but Rails and Ruby are elegant to mine. The one that really impresses me is that Ruby supports the Uniform Access Principal[1] Right on!
• Simplicity. The elegance and completeness just make the whole thing simple.
• Well defined best practices. When the whole stack is well defined it's easy to come up with best practices. I've found Railscasts to be a good source of basic practices.
• Ajax support baked in. I really like this. I looked at the Dojo support in Struts 2 and didn't care for it and started using Prototype, which Rails uses. So, my knowledge has carried right over.
• No deploys and restarts. Need I say more. I can support more iterations on less powerful developer machines and save the money. We've been running on G5's and Mac Pros for some time now. They're just overkill for Rails. What a pleasure to have a responsive development environment that I'm not waiting for.

  This issue all on its own is what pushed me to get Groovy Works working. Groovy Works isn't as good as Rails, because all transactional classes must implement an interface, so if you change the interface you have to restart. Even with this deficiency it would be hard for me to calculate the amount of time not needing to deploy and restart has saved me over the past year using Groovy Works. I can't imagine how much more I'll save with Rails.

• Oh yeah, TextMate. I know it's not RoR, but damn does it work nice with Rails. Twelve hours and my hands are already remembering the short cuts after using vi for 12 years every day for programming.

Well, as you can probably tell, I'm pretty excited about Rails. I'm going to keep walking toward the light.

[1] Myer, Bertrand, "Object Oriented Software Construction": Basically it boils down to being able to access a member or a method that takes no arguments using the same syntax. This allows you to change from a member to a method and not break your existing code.