<story><title>Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby&apos;s bright multicore future)</title><url>http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/why-critics-of-rails-have-it-all-wrong.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>programminggeek</author><text>I love Ruby, but I have no love for Rails. Want to write a nice JSON API using something light and nice? Use Sinatra, pick your favorite ORM (even ActiveRecord) and go to town. Why mess with all the other Rails junk when you can have a simple app.rb for your sinatra app and just write simple little controller actions and you&apos;re good to go?&lt;p&gt;You don&apos;t need all the ceremony and structure of Rails and MVC to write a JSON api, you just don&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;Worrying about Rails&apos; future and if it&apos;s still &quot;winning&quot;(for some definition of winning?) compared to node.js is silly and reminds me of how many Java devs had an existential crisis about the future of Java since Java 7 took a few too many years to ship.&lt;p&gt;Rails is a web MVC framework, that&apos;s it. It&apos;s not even the only or best web framework in ruby. Rails is not ruby. It is not designed to compete with node. Node is a totally different thing.&lt;p&gt;Compare node and ruby and that&apos;s a more interesting and correct comparison, but I&apos;ve happily used both and neither one is going to &quot;kill&quot; the other any more than Rails killed PHP or Java killed C++.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nahname</author><text>I really liked using Sinatra until I used it with a team. The lack of ceremony and structure (as you put it) killed us. The app started out as just a simple service, so why not use Sinatra right? Then things changed and we were more focused on the web side, but stuck with Sinatra because everyone had heard the FUD about rails.&lt;p&gt;Each person has a preference on where they thought something should be. Days were spent arguing over the location of mundane things. Each team member had a different understanding of REST, so without the rails routing we argued about what we thought an ideal API would look like. We argued about which view engine we should introduce. We argued about how to handle our JS/CS. We argued some more about routes and how to make them more discoverable. On and on. Not intentional, but something new would come up and we would need to figure out where to put it.&lt;p&gt;This, more than anything, hammered home for me the strength of rails. Rails is great at getting you up and running, but it&apos;s greatest strength is that it&apos;s idioms are well documented. That gives developers a strong impression of how things are going to be and where things go. This saves you so much time by not having to argue and reach consensus on every little thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby&apos;s bright multicore future)</title><url>http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/why-critics-of-rails-have-it-all-wrong.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>programminggeek</author><text>I love Ruby, but I have no love for Rails. Want to write a nice JSON API using something light and nice? Use Sinatra, pick your favorite ORM (even ActiveRecord) and go to town. Why mess with all the other Rails junk when you can have a simple app.rb for your sinatra app and just write simple little controller actions and you&apos;re good to go?&lt;p&gt;You don&apos;t need all the ceremony and structure of Rails and MVC to write a JSON api, you just don&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;Worrying about Rails&apos; future and if it&apos;s still &quot;winning&quot;(for some definition of winning?) compared to node.js is silly and reminds me of how many Java devs had an existential crisis about the future of Java since Java 7 took a few too many years to ship.&lt;p&gt;Rails is a web MVC framework, that&apos;s it. It&apos;s not even the only or best web framework in ruby. Rails is not ruby. It is not designed to compete with node. Node is a totally different thing.&lt;p&gt;Compare node and ruby and that&apos;s a more interesting and correct comparison, but I&apos;ve happily used both and neither one is going to &quot;kill&quot; the other any more than Rails killed PHP or Java killed C++.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nateberkopec</author><text>FTA: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/1942658&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://gist.github.com/1942658&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why wouldn&apos;t you just do a 50-line Rails app instead, and slot in any other Rails niceties when you feel like you need them?</text></comment>