When will Ruby have its own identity on web compared to PHP.
Can you answer these burning questions about Ruby with Proof.
Have long shall we continue to pamper it against PHP.
All good things said about Ruby turns to blank expressions when it comes to actual implementations or a explaining a proof on Web.
We read all good stories about Ruby, that it has a great syntax....Its totally object Oriented.... Its Powerful..... Rails was successful because it has Ruby as an language... A lots of religious wars fighting to favour Ruby till end.
If all said above its true... Then why the Impact of Ruby is far behind when it comes to Real Life web implementations on web...?
Its tough to see...
a great Forum developed totally in Ruby...Like PHPBB and many others available in PHP
Its tough to see..
Great e-commerce sites developed in Ruby....
Its tough to see..
Shout Box or Guest Book implementations in Ruby
Its tough to see...
Classifieds or dating Sites in Ruby.. which are flooded with PHP
Its tough to see...
Real Ruby Jobs and Ruby websites in New Projects.
Its tough to see...
Many other scenarios apart i mentioned above...
We have all been praising Ruby for a longer time since it deserves it.
But now... we have to take a Real life approach... since praising alone will not bring Bread and butter in the family.
We have been watching many Ruby Frameworks for the web like...
Rails
Merb
Camping
Sinatra
Ramaze
Nitro
Vintage
Wuby
What is the motto of all this frameworks, if none of them is finally going to offer us even a slice of bread, without Butter or jam at the end. Ruby is getting ported on different platforms... But where is the real life proof. Few examples cannot be taken as granted that Ruby is Powerful on web.
The most common example i have been watching for Ruby is " Blog Development in 10 Minutes ". Ok... thats one example, now what about the next example. And there is no answer to it. If Ruby development is that easy... then why there are no live examples. Why there are no real life starter kits explaining the power of Ruby on Web. Why there are no tutorials with a live proof running those examples.
Book publishers makes lots of money explaining the power of Ruby...But have they really shown any working example on web so far. Students get carried away with such books and developers are sitting silently watching this cheating grow.. Is it fair for our own Ruby community in long run.
I know it sounds sad to curse our own language... But at the end of the day we have to live. Its nice and easy to say thousand words favouring Ruby against PHP..... BUT... Its tough to utter even few words about the lack of Ruby's presence on Web compared to PHP.
Its better to scold and slap our child now... before he turns a terrorist in future. Its the best step taken by the real parents and that should be our approach as developers too. Ruby is our child and it should not be pampered beyond limits.
There are several factors affecting the real life scenario of Ruby development on web and one of them is tough deployment fear. Its time to build real life examples floating on the web, that can show and explain the speed of Ruby.
If you confident to prove its a day... you will have to show the world a shinning sun..
If you are sure its a night... you will have to show a moon.
If you are sure that ruby is powerful... come out with live examples.
I would like to hear more suggestions to make Ruby appear everywhere on the web. I do not want Ruby to live a long life only for hobbyists and students. I want it for developers too.
A Little joke at the end... Based on the topic above, as a moral of the story
A Father was praising his family in front of a relative.
Father said.. I have 5 son.
One is a doctor... .... Great, said the relative, He was impressed
Next one is Scientist....... Wow! said the relative
Third is a Developer...... Great!
Fourth is a Bank Officer...... Nice! . And what about your last child.
He runs a taxi....... So disappointing, said the relative. Sorry to hear about this poor fellow.
Don't feel sad, said the happy father. " He's the one who brings the income at home."
Namaste!
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Are we Pampering or Killing Ruby against Php silently.
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22 comments:
Hi there..
Very true. A Right message indeed. Yes.. Publishers and few regular bloggers are misguiding the Real Ruby charm.
If Ruby is that powerful, why don't i see, many tutorials around. The only thing i find again and again like you is Blog.
I'm sick of this bloody Blogs tutorial.
Fredrik
Ok...
Cheereo..
This blog should have appeared long back.
Real eye opener blog indeed.
Few, blog tutorials and few handy sites created only by Ruby on Rails to promote their own skills, does not mean Ruby on Rails is everywhere.
Why Real life Ruby Websites are not seen, when compared to PHP.
OK... if our Ruby community escapes with an excise like.. Ruby has a late entry on web, then on the other side you also say creating Ruby on Rails websites takes few days only.
Is Ruby just few days old...?
C'Mon guys, face the right facts. Its time to make Ruby Popular and make some real life work floating
Jasmin ( India )
great.... great.... great..
I could hardly find any project to study to complete my Ruby assignment.
I searched for Ruby scripts here and there on the web.. google... yahoo.. etc every where. None was available.
Bulshit... what a Ruby on Rails monopoly... i cant even deploy my project with Mod_ruby support.
I was forced to accept that if i want Ruby on web.. then i should go Ruby on rails way.
I kicked of and went for asp.net project. I scored 87% marks and a job indeed.
No doubt.. PHP and Asp.net are far better with deplpyment and support wise.
Real life is Real life
I wasted 2 months on Ruby on Rails scripts gaining nothing.
I found my bread,. Butter and chicken with my Rum with asp.net.
I am earning $2500 now on full time job and earning more with work at home.
Hey.. do blog such real life.. eye opening blogs man.
John MC.
Lets talk about ROR first, since its 2 years old on the web..
only few real life scenario for Ruby on Web and that too created to promote Ruby on rails job and few handy developers.
Here's the list as per my knowledge.
(1)One e-commerce site known as shoppy
(2) One CMS - known as Maphesto
(3) One Forum -- known as beast
Is this a forum for humans or Beast.. I don't know..
There can be few more examples, but i have hardly seen more..
Lets see.. what other frameworks do. if they don't come out with real life scripts to study, Ruby world will end soon.
I love Ruby and I hate few developers, who hold the monopoly in deployment area.
Don't Kill Ruby Please...
RubyMan ( Brazil )
I cannot find any of such sites created by Ruby or ROR...
No FaceBook On Ruby...
No PHPBB ( Forums) on Ruby....
No WordPress on Ruby....
No Dating Site on Ruby....
No Digg/Dzone like sites on Ruby
No Scripts to Exchange/Study on Ruby
Yet...
Every one claims ROR is powerful and Ruby is Great.
It seems Ruby and Ruby World is hacked and maintained by few Ruby on Rails developers.
Long Live this blog.
I support you. You can save many students now.
Steve
Hi,
It seems ZED was right...
He was the only one fighting against ROR monopoly.
Now this Blogger seems to be fighting for the Real Ruby Growth.
He wants to save the Real Ruby.
BTW. what this blogger says is right. He can save many young students, who take this Ruby projects with a fascination or ROR hype and repent later on
Michael
I have to disagree - I'll admit straight up I'm a ruby fan but there is more to ruby (and rails) than just that 'bloody blogs tuorial' to quote the first commentor.
There are a few rails apps (e.g. Beast for Forums, ElDorado I think it is called as well. Typo, Mephisto, SimpleLog for Blogs (others) and I'm sure more than a few other people haven't publicised. There's also shopping app's - there is Substruct (which is one you host) or the hosted application "Shopify" (written with Rails). But that's against the point.
When developing with Ruby (be it rails or merb (which is fantastic btw - peepcode.com recently published a new pdf ebook on it in draft form) you will find issues with certain sections but the rails / ruby community is generally very willing to help. The community tends to shy away from apps in the same vain as PHP has - e.g. there aren't any real phpBB / Wordpress equivelants but rather smaller apps. One of the reasonings behind this I suspect is because for most rails developers, if there is something specific you want it's *generally* (I say generally because there are exceptions) not too hard to add it in yourself.
Lastly, all this talk of the ruby community dieing is complete and utter bullshit. Seriously, there are a lot of smart people working on cool projects to change the ruby landscape and imho although Rails is losing some popularity (there are alot of people using it for the wrong reasons), there are solutions to most problems popping up all the time. Rails deployment is admittedly a pain in the ass on shared hosting but on anything else, if you get a sane environment set up then it's generally damned easy to get going. I have an application where once I've made changes it's literally one command to run my tests and if they pass, check in the changes and deploy the newest version.
Lastly, I've got two more key points - firstly, if you know what your doing, Rails jobs aren't hard to find. There are many rails developers turning down well paying jobs (note: most are freelance jobs mind you) because they simply can't handle the load. Also, tutorial wise - yes, there is a lack of writing full blow tutorials. If your willing to buy a book though (say, The Rails Way) or even the Peepcode screencasts, you'll learn fast enough. The 'magic' of rails is admittedly a pain at sometimes but it's all about understanding. Learn Ruby / the framework and it's fairly straight forward to change the framework to suite your needs. For people complaining of blog posts (not just here, overall), it's hard to really introduce rails in anything short of few pages. I'm sure I've missed something but still.
Err, I should point out my post isn't directed at the author of the post - rather the general qualms many people have (I agree with your post here that it needs a seperate identity to php) but I feel it might come across wrong.
Fact is...
Until Ruby deployment is as easy as PHP. Ruby programing will just give you pleasure. Not Dollars.
Ruby =! Dollars.
Ruby + easy deployment = DOLLARS
Lets Hope Engine yard with such a big amount in their pocket will change this.
But once again this deployment area will become their monopoly.
Give us Mod_Ruby like Mod_php and we all together can do wonders with apache and fast CGI.
Till then..lets pray Ruby does not become PREY.
Hazzle
@Michael,
What has ZED to do here.
ZED had a different story and this is a different story.
Both are covering different issues. This blog is based on real life approach and Bread butter issue with ROR or any Ruby framework for future.
Other Framework developers should think of coming out with good Starter kits or they will fail downhead.
I favour starter kits, i specially like starter kits (asp.net) approach.
Hope IronRuby team will study this blog
Dilip ( India )
I don't get the complaints here - What's the difference between a blog and a "formal web tutorial"? I see it as just web content... beyond the semantics, to me they're one in the same.
Also, hobbyists are developers. Developers are hobbyists.
When developing within a _ruby_ web framework like, rails, merb, etc... you still need to write _ruby_ code. So, I don't get the 'totally in ruby' complaint.
As far as real world deployments - I don't think you're looking hard enough. Off the top of my head - scribd.com, pragmaticstudio.com (hey at least they eat their own dog food), beast.caboo.se (forums) , twitter.com (arguably the largest 'ruby' app out there).
Although, I'm not sure I understand why it matters that much. Are you looking for justification through popularity? Just cause Windows is most deployed OS in the world, doesn't mean its a great operating system. It just means its deployed a lot.
'Conventional wisdom' is derived from the phrase 'convenient wisdom' which is basically just 'lazy wisdom'.
What's this pile of bullshit about Ruby dying?
Ruby is not dying. It is dead. Now is the time for justice. "You speak venom", they say. Well, where is the money that DHH left? "It's gone. I put it in a secret account and you'll never find it." That's it, I tire of your games. I'm coding in IO now.
This blog post doesn't make any sense at all. Ruby is far more than just a web development language! Ruby is the new Perl for system administration and loads of other tasks. Pretty much anything people are doing with Python, they're doing with Ruby; the only difference is which language they like using.
Php gained lots of traction by having a commercial company backing it and building its interpreter. Most PHP apps stink (inside). The code is usually horrible. It doesn't mean bad apps, just bad code. WordPress is a wonderful platform to use, but a horrible platform to customize!
But that's a web app. Remember, nobody is using PHP for system administration or software deployment or shell scripting. It can be done, but nobody is doing it.
The languages are different. They have different paradigms and ecologies.
As for ASP... M$...
Today I gave a look at the newspaper's IT offerings in the classifieds in my city of Brazil, and to my surprise, there was a guy who said he did web sites for you using Ruby on Rails.
Wow! I remember when I announced the same kinds of services but for Desktop applications using Delphi about 6 years ago.
Things change.
Check out projects using Rails:
* http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=rails
* http://rubyforge.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=rails&Search=Search
I'm not really into Rails though. But if you can't find Rails successes, you aren't looking hard enough:
* Friends for Sale Architecture - A 300 Million Page View/Month Facebook RoR App - http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app
Hi All,
It seems you are over looking the main point of the blog here. The blogger is not against Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
He is against the lack of Real Life Implementations on the web.
OK... of out some blog comments here,can any one point me out and give me links to the websites they haver created in 2 years.
Lets count the No. of links given here and the sites you own or have developed with Ruby or ROR.
Thanks
If you can't find examples of Ruby forums, e-commerce sites, or whatever, that's down to your lack of search ability, not a true lack of examples.
Just for starters.. Shopify powers lots of e-commerce sites, Beast is a Rails powered open source forum system, Typo and Mephisto are popular blog systems. It is true, however, that many Rails projects are "behind closed doors" and are not open source projects. This is because there's a lot more money to be made in using the efficiency gains Rails provides rather than releasing open source code, so the open source examples are less common.
Since you / someone challenged people to mention things they'd done in Rails, I have two examples for myself (I've done a lot more than this, but these were the most successful).
Code Snippets http://snippets.dzone.com/ was developed by me 3 years ago and sold to DZone a year ago. It was the first tagged code snippets repository and now has > 10000 users. It sold for $30,000.
Feed Digest http://www.feeddigest.com/ was a business initially developed by me 3 years ago (running on Ruby and Rails, with some Perl) and sold to a Russian company six months ago. I cannot tell you how much for but far, far more than the other site. It now serves about 400 million requests per month.
Oh, and what about 43folders, 43places, all of the 37signals apps, yellowpages.com, twitter.com..?
Judging something by the amount of tutorials that are out there for it isn't really worthwhile. Rails coders are busy developing and making money instead of writing tutorials (although the tutorials that do get written are certainly of a higher standard than the average PHP ones..)
One good reason why people don't create a full fledged Rails blogging engine, is because there is Wordpress!
One good reason why people don't create another bulletin board in Rails is because there is PHPBB!
I, for one, would never try to match those projects with my own efforts, why would I? If I need a blog on my site, I just install Wordpress.
Now the fact that so many people out there *are* trying to build another "rails-like" framework (Grails, Zend, Cake..) is because they DO have a need: they are not happy with their current options.
Question remains, why aren't there that many successful rails powered sites out there? Well I think that's simply to do with the fact that rails, compared to PHP, is still young. And it requires more theoretical knowlegde IMHO.
And as far as deployment goes, I wasn't particularly fond of comparing book long php.ini files and trying to build funky PHP modules from source. I prefer a simple "gem install" and "cap deploy:migrations" any time.
That said, I do like PHP and really like the tools and documentation. But I wouldn't like to switch back from RoR.
I think it's because Ruby is a programmer's language. Programmers love it, we use it, and we know enough about it to know howto deploy it.
Anyone can code a contact form in PHP. And it's none too hard to use some of the PHP frameworks like Cake to have a rails-like experience that's easy to deploy.
But, in the end ... it's programmers who use and deploy ruby.
Designers and web developers that aren't heavy into programming prefer PHP because it's easy.
This is a big reason that I think we see more people moving from ASP.NET and Java to rails than people moving from PHP. Most ASP.NET/Java coders are object-oriented programmers who're heavy into computer science. For us, ruby is beautiful and easy and powerful.
For people who're more comfortable with PHP scripting ... ruby honestly isn't all that hot. Ruby is far more powerful in the hands of those who already have object-oriented programming experience ... folks who have Fowler's books on their nighttable. Who live in code.
As far as seeing production sites using Ruby ... ruby (on the web) is still pretty young (popularity-wise). Wait, and I think we'll be seeing it more and more.
Ruby is used a LOT more in the dark, back corners of enterprise data centers, etc, than it's used to host sites to tons and tons and tons of users on the public internet. Ruby is hosting REST Apis. It's monitoring people's web servers and processes. It's running those internal intranet tools.
Ruby is already being used a lot, you're just looking in the wrong places. I'm also guessing that ASP was used on local intranets for awhile before it was used to host big sites. Go ask system administrators what they're writing their web GUI's in these days ... if they're not using Perl anymore, they're probably using Ruby.
Talk to the database administrators running their database scripts with one of Ruby's ORMs, in the dark corners of your enterprise's IT department.
Also, ask people about the low traffic websites they're making. There are lots of little web apps around that're running on rails / merb / camping / etc that you're unlikely to stubleupon or notice that they're running ruby. Apache/FastCGI runs lots of low-traffic sites. You don't need a tweaked Nginx/Mongrel-or-Thin server setup to run your little apps ... and I think that trips up a lot of people.
Hell, lots of PHP coders think that their PHP sites will perform well under load and don't realize that *even php* needs dedicated processes and load balancing when the load gets high. But, for some reason, when people deploy ruby apps, they assume they're going to be getting a million hits a day or something. Just throw it up using FastCGI and you'll be fine - or run a few dedicated processes that run multiple apps.
Well ... i ranted on long enough. Ruby blogs and screencasts, etc, are becoming more frequent ... I hope to see more people using ruby in more interesting ways and ... will it "kill" PHP? Who knows. Who cares? We'll see. But I don't think so - their target audiences are pretty different.
@ peter cooper..
Judging something by the amount of tutorials that are out there for it isn't really worthwhile. Rails coders are busy developing and making money instead of writing tutorials (although the tutorials that do get written are certainly of a higher standard than the average PHP ones..)
--------------------------------
Hi, Just wondering, how long will the developers team continue calling ROR a young Project.
How long will the developers would take to make enough money, before coming out with the Open Source code.
Don't you think.. this phase would end up, when Ironruby shall shine up with 2 different MVC at their disposal and enough Starterkits at their disposal, as they are already doing it now.
Starterkits and Tutorials should not be hidden for a rapid growth, that my final word for an OSS.
Thanx
I agree with some points in certain ways, but I have my own takes
lots of sites and domains run php
but 95%+ are running on shared hosting and are running readymade apps, very few apps are original or even customised, (have you ever customised templates for phpbb,oscommerce or written hacks/mods for phpnuke and its clones)
the only reason for it is you take apache and mysql for granted and most code are dependent on it for production. there are db abstraction libraries like adodb available, but how many use it?
how many people(% of users) contribute to php based app projects.
how many php developers in the market can work on mysql directly without phpmyadmin
ease of use is "not" dependence on sharedhosting, ftp uploads and one click installs on plesk and other hosting softwares.
ruby is not perfect but it is metamorphing, speed still is a issue, but there are many alternate language implementations coming, which are targetting specific shortcomings and excelling in those target areas.
ruby getting more PR does not mean end of road for php or any other language. even that limelight came only when Ruby on Rails came in, but it has been the most influential app-framework in last 5 years, every other web app has taken some best practices.
@ All Developers
I'm challenging all the developers above who have praised Ruby till end, without accepting the fact that Not Much Sites /Tutorials / Starterkits are available.
OK... If they are available show the link here and guide others. Don't just create the hype and make money from students at least.
If you really want the community to grow.. then produce some starter kits based on different subjects like...
(1) Classified - Craigslist Type
(2) Dating --- Dating Pro Type
(3) Many with requests
Develop, Teach, help, promote. Now.. this can be called spirit, to help others and let others grow.
I want this and the Author of this blog wants the same thing here.
He is 100% right in his own way. FEW Book Publishers are just cheating without a real life examples.
Thanks
A real life example!
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