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May 25, 2007
One of Bill Mollison's insights with Permaculture was that the edges are the most dynamic point. Consequently he designed his permacultural systems to maximise the edges and give the greatest dynamicism. Technology is no different.
I am no rails fanboy specifically; I ended up enjoying the productivity that Turbogears, its python equivalent, gave me. But that is six of this and half a dozen of that. This new generation of frameworks knocks the socks off the late 90s and early aughts attempt to increase productivity - and that includes frameworks on Sun's Java and Microsoft's dotNet.
In the mid-1990s every software shop was rolling their own framework, which was a pain to maintain, took untold hours to complete, etc. So companies and opensource projects stepped in to take that pain away. Software shops started developing and deploying on big heavyweight platforms like websphere or opensource projects like struts. But they were a pain to configure, deploy and maintain - really painful. They were fat and complex solutions, that, while superior to the roll your own framework era, still cost too much in effort. Then Ruby on Rails came along and raised the bar on what it meant to be immediately productive.
A website I check regularly is Elliote Rusty Harold's cafeaulait.org which has a quote of the day - usually on technology, sometimes politics. Today he has a quote from Joel Spolsky about the performance issues of Ruby on Rails. I do not know why Spolsky is so well respected as a technology commentator; he did project manage (IIRC) a version of Excel. But technologically he is at least five years behind and he is in permanent 'dig the heels' in mode. He has to be dragged kicking and screaming as each new edge intrudes into mainstream technology. In 2004 I wrote an article: Welcome to 1997 Joel which captures his not wanting to surf the edges and stick with what he knows or is comfortable with.
I remember when Java appeared the tech world was inundated with article after article on how Java was slower and more heavyweight than C/C++. Java was derided for its effeminance and not being 'close to the metal'. The fact was though; removing pointers, adding garbage collection and distributing a rich standard API wrapped in c-like semantics was hugely productive.
The Rails era is the next step in productivity; yes if you do something complex rails doesn't offer the same simplicity, which has always been true of any platform. But thanks to Ruby on Rails as a second generation framework - and its imitators - what used to take three months to do, now takes three weeks.
Joel Spolsky writes:
I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun, but for Serious Business Stuff you really must recognize that there just isn't a lot of experience in the world building big mission critical web systems in Ruby on Rails, and I'm really not sure that you won't hit scaling problems, or problems interfacing with some old legacy thingamabob, or problems finding programmers who can understand the code, or whatnot.
Java's productivity and security meant that more hardware could be thrown at the problem while still remaining cost competitive, and now, once the JVM is up and running it is faster than C in many instances. Ruby is not a new technology, it has been around for a while now, longer than the dotNet virtual machine IIRC.
In the early aughts Microsoft played catchup to the Java/JVM phenomenon with its dotNet bundle. Joel was dragged kicking and screaming from the desktop world into the web world. It appears he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Rails edge as well. But the fact is, it is amazing how low the overhead is in getting a project up and running in Rails and just how productive that environment is - developers will always choose to get something to market first and then, if there are issues, throw hardware and tech at the problem later - and that doesn't hurt.
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Cam,
It's off topic but Microsoft was in Canberra this week in the person of CEO Steve Ballmer. He met with the PM for an hour in Parliament House to talk about trends in global technology----getting the various government departments to upgrade to Vista? Intellectual property rights?
Ballmer speaks today to the American Chamber of Commerce. The state of Australia's broadband (thanks to Telstra) has been a long standing point of friction for Microsoft, as the Windows platform is increasingly dependent on high speed internet connections.
I mention it because I presume that Microsoft is an example of company that resists the software technological change you talk about, even more than your Joel Spolsky.
On a personal note I hate Microsoft for its junk code as much as I hate Telstra for its brakes on broadband.