Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

Ruby on Rails is a great web framework because it establishes smart conventions and application structure. To those of us who already were making well-structured web applications (particularly true in the Java community), it took us a while to see what the big deal is about Rails. After all, we were already using many of the practices Rails brought to the masses.

Even so, Rails is a pretty big deal. The productivity gains of using Rails are quite impressive. The underlying language, Ruby, is very capable and beautiful. Compared with a language like PHP, Ruby is just elegant and wonderful. If you are a competent Lisp or Python programmer, you are probably scratching your head wondering why Ruby became more popular. I don't know either. Probably because Rails is written in Ruby.

My main complaint about Ruby is deployment. If you have lots of hardware and prefer an organized deployment approach, Rails will feel right at home. On the other hand, many clients I work with prefer a simpler ad-hoc deployment process and want to use stock servers and ISPs. In that scenario, Rails is harder to deploy relative to other technology options.