Shopping Around

The last time I wrote a web app was when I was learning Rails a few years ago, and I appreciated how easy it was to use. Rails has been the hot new way to write web apps for a while, and overall I enjoy using it, but there were a few things about it that I didn’t like like so much (more on that later), so it wasn’t a clear winner for me. I wanted to pursue my other options.

My largest body of experience is with Java, so I looked down that path. At a previous job, I had used the Spring framework which was fine at the time, but it’s definitely one of those things where you need to spend a fair amount of time setting up new projects and specifying configuration options (or at least writing scripts to automate that stuff). Using Rails made writing applications so much more rewarding in this respect, as you can get a project setup and doing things in no time. There are more Java web frameworks around now than when I was working with them, and a lot of them try to be more Rails-like. Many of them seemed fine to me, but the user communities (support) for each were quite small, and after all they are just different frameworks, each with their own ‘way’, so I kept looking.

PHP was also a big contender in my mind, largely because of its wide adoption, and because I thought it would run much faster than Ruby/Rails. I found some good looking frameworks, namely CakePHP and Symphony (also Rails influenced), and spent some time trying them out. I would definitely consider them if you are working on a PHP project. I decided ultimately that I wasn’t, I just found PHP unpleasant to read and work with. This was my personal project after all, and I knew from past experience that how much enjoyment I got from the work would be the number one factor for how long the project would live.

I examined other languages and frameworks, but none of them were compelling enough for me to want to learn the language and framework API.

So, Ruby on Rails it was I guess, projects were fun and easy to write, and there was a huge community of people writing libraries and articles for support. But, there were also some downsides…

Ruby, Hold the Rails

Personally, I like to be able to wrap my head around everything my application is doing. I like it when I see a bug manifest, and I at least know where to start looking to fix it. When I was first learning Rails, this was a problem for me, seeing something not work, and not knowing at all why. Back to the API docs and thumbing through the book. I also didn’t like the fact that I would try to write some sort of behavior, and later find out there was a ‘Rails way’ to do it. Surely the Rails way was magic and easy, but it meant that I had to give a fair amount of my energy towards learning the ‘Rails way’.

Then there is the question of performance. Now, I never ran benchmarks or load tested any servers, but from what I read on the nets, it seems that Rails uses a hefty chunk of memory, and doesn’t deliver particularly fast under pressure. Now it may have been putting the horse before the cart as they say, but I wanted to make the right choices early on, so that when my little web app did start getting traffic, it wouldn’t bring me any unnecessary sorrows. Besides, I just want things to be clean and efficient, and it just doesn’t sit well with me when I know they aren’t.

At the time I was considering all this, I was also considering Google App Engine for hosting, and I was reading various posts about people trying to use Ruby there. And that’s where I heard about this thing called Sinatra that got me started down the path that I’m currently walking.

I ultimately came to realize that what I liked most was working with Ruby: its syntax, its cleanliness and simplicity, its unique idioms. Rails is just the de facto method for building web apps in Ruby, and for good reason, it is a very effective tool. It has brought thousands of developers to Ruby, and now there are numerous projects in Ruby that don’t involve Rails at all. This is the route I’m taking now, Ruby off Rails, and it makes coding exciting and interesting for me again.

That’s where I am now on this latest coding venture of mine. Later in this blog I want to tell you all about the tools that I have found (and am writing) that are making coding a joy.