General Info - Ruby On Rails Presentation Notes

Minutes of the 8 May 2007 meeting, "Ruby on Rails: The Good, the Bad
Posted by: JZapin
Date: Wed Jun 6, 2007 8:46 pm ((PDT))

I'm sorry for the delay in getting these out.

I will follow up with a link to the speaker notes.

JZ

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
About 50 people attended tonight's meeting. Josh Zapin facilitated and
Jeremy Kohler recorded the minutes.

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MEETING SPONSORS

Microstaff (www.microstaff.com) provides refreshments, Copy Diva
(www.copydiva.com) provides the audio-visual equipment, NCAR
(www.ncar.ucar.edu) provides the facility, and ONEWARE
(www.oneware.com) sponsors these minutes.


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ANNOUNCEMENTS

Josh welcomes suggestions for topics and speakers for future meetings,
please email Josh with your ideas.

Derailed is an RoR user's group in Denver, and there's also a Ruby
user's group that meets at Collective Intellect. Google it to find out
more.
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INTRODUCTION (Josh Zapin)

Ruby On Rails (RoR) has taken the programming world by storm since it
was released to the public in July 2004. RoR combines Ruby, an object
oriented programming language with super-clean syntax, with Rails, an
open-source Model-View-Controller (MVC) based framework that enables
development, according to rubyonrails.org, ten times faster than
typical frameworks. The two together enable programmers to create
fully functioning websites in a fraction of the time. There are demos
on rubyonrails.org allowing you to build five-minute websites.
Sounds too good to be true? Consider the following:
- The official RoR website features two almost-too-good-to-be-true
demos: Creating a Weblog in 15 minutes and a Flickr interface in 5
minutes. (I've personally tried them and it's true)
- RoR has built in AJAX libraries such as Script.aculo.us to make very
slick user experiences within a typical web browsers, enabling a high
level of usability.
- Apple will be adding RoR as part of their next version of OS X (due
in October).
But how many times have we heard and tried new development platforms
only to have them not meet up with the hype, and is RoR all what it's
cracked up to be? Well maybe not, as fantasy doesn't always match
reality. So let's put our geekiness hats on.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Gustafson (mailto:dave.gustafson@wyantdata.com) is Vice
President of Technology and Product Development for Wyant Data
Systems, Inc. Dave joined WDS from his position as Founder and Chief
Architect of Cold Mountain Software, a provider of software services
and products for project management and enterprise knowledge
management. Prior to Cold Mountain Software, Dave was Chief Architect
and Co-Founder of Accumedia.com, Inc., a provider of hosted and
managed content management, control, and delivery systems targeted to
the media and entertainment industries. Dave holds a BA in Physics
from Middlebury College and has done graduate study in Computer
Science at Worcester Polytech and the University of Colorado.

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LINKS

wyantdata.com
rubyonrails.org


------------------------
DAVID GUSTAFSON

Ruby on Rails in Context: Should we care?

Where does RoR fit in the context of the programming world at large?
Yes, We should care.
If you don't remember much of this presentation, or if you completely
forget that you were even here, just remember these two things:

1. How to peel a banana. Seems absurd. Well, monkeys peel it
differently. They pinch the bottom to split it open, and that's the
proper way to peel a banana. Go try it, but do it first at home where
no one can see...you might make a mess.

2. Ruby and Rails are Real! You can't just dismiss the hype, so make a
small investment to see how it might fit in the context of your work.

I'm not an expert on RoR, but I manage complexity and risk. I deal
with problem spaces and solutions. What I do for a living: last week I
testified before the CO legislature, doing IV&V for a voter
registration system. So I have to testify about how well millions of
dollars are being spent on this system. Would I advocate using RoR for
implementing voter registration? Forget about it. It's just not mature
enough for that.

I have a passion for programming languages. I was managing a Java app
and a .Net app. The Java was a disaster, .Net was working well. So I
did some experiments comparing productivity of various apps, timing
how long it took to do a mini project. I threw Ruby into the mix. The
result: What took 2.5 hours in Java took 15 minutes in Ruby.

Philip Greenspun says, "Java is the SUV of programming tools" It's
like driving your giant SUV just to go to a 7-11.

Risk: "There are old climbers, there are bold climbers, but there are
no old bold climbers."
Climbing gear is heavy. Are you going to carry 60 pounds of gear just
go bouldering? So Java is too heavy for some stuff.

Why should we care about RoR?

- In the right circumstances it gives you a 5- to 10-fold increase in
productivity.

- It is subject to programmer motivation. Linus's Law: programmers go
through Survival, Social Life, and Entertainment (the highest
pinnacle). RoR can help them get there.

- It is subject to business motivation: productivity = $$

WHAT IS RAILS?

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web
applications. This is what most web apps are now. Database, reports,
and forms. That's it. Based on Model-View-Controller pattern, which
came out of Smalltalk. It all happens in the browser as part of Ajax.

Convention over Configuration: this is controversial. Instead of
having a way to configure everything under the sun, you have to follow
conventions. But if you do follow the conventions, everything just
falls into place.

Meta-programming: This is generating dynamic code on the fly (you
never see it) to process the tables you tell it about. It finds all
the columns, like magic.

A language for mapping: It's very easy to specify class relationships.
Little statements like "has many pictures" tells it about a
one-to-many relationship, which saves you a lot of time.


WHAT IS RUBY?

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy
object-oriented programming. It was created by an amateur who put
together some small stuff to make Ruby: combining features of
Smalltalk, Perl, and Lisp.

"High-level languages are often all treated as equivalent. They're
not" --Paul Graham.

Using Lisp, Graham said he could add new features faster than his
competitors could announce them. This is a historical example of using
a language as a "secret weapon" to gain significant competitive
advantage.

What's it like?

Convention over Configuration: Say here's a table, and it will go off
and find all the columns. Not like XML which you configure like crazy.
Don't get me started about XML. You screw up there and you could be
chasing down issues for days.

With Ruby, it just feels like configuration, but you're really writing
code. Like Emacs.

LANGUAGE INTERLUDE

Embedded DSLs.
Rails is a domain-specific language specifically in the domain of
creating database web applications. Ruby is very well suited to
creating DSLs. It's not like Python, where there is only one way to do
things. Ruby gives you a zillion ways to do things. Totally object
oriented. "33.multiplynext" for example, is an object in Ruby if you
want it to be.

Thoughts on Languages: The highest correlation between implementations
is the programmer. Wide range of skills and speed. The difference
between programmers is larger than the difference between languages.
Usually the guy that knows more languages is going to be more
productive.

RoR BUZZ

Productivity questions: performance, scalability, legacy integration,
range of application. It can't handle multiple-column primary keys,
so often you must create views to handle legacy integration. So that's
a bit tricky.

Should I bet my job on RoR? Go to my boss and take a stand?

CROSSING THE CHASM

Marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers: for
high technology, any successful item must cross the chasm between the
"early adopters" and the "early majority" starting to adopt the
technology. It's very difficult for a language to cross that chasm.
Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, Java all did it. Now what's the next language?
Will Ruby cross the chasm?

It needs critical mass of a programmer community, people who will bet
their jobs on learning this language. Or a "killer app" can do it. Is
Rails the killer app that will help Ruby cross the chasm?

Before Rails, I thought Ruby lagged behind Python and Perl because of
less complete and less mature libraries.

Ruby Risk vs. Java Risk.
Ruby risk is going down, and Java risk is going up (because of its
increasing complexity over time). Java generates confusion over which
framework to use. But it's very hard to sell Ruby to someone who has
already bet their job and critical software on Java.

EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS

- JRuby: a jar you put into your Java application, to quickly map out
business rules. Running Rails on top of Java should soon be an
alternative.
- Ruby on the CLR (Microsoft common language runtime)
- Microsoft is joining the party by announcing Silverlight and DLR
(Dynamic Language Runtime), based on Jim Hugunin's work with
IronPython, faster than CPython, made a DLR on top of thatCLR, that
runsin the future should be able to run Ruby in the browser: no more
javascript!

Pitfalls and Opportunities

It's simple and easy to get started, but subtle to achieve the kind of
power that Rails displays. See the Ruby Quiz on rubyonrails.org.

When you create a Rails application you could approach it in a variety
of ways. #1(good) Build your application on top of the Rails
framework. #2(great!) When you build a Rails app, think how to extend
Rails to build your own dynamic language for your specific domain.

This might be the most valuable recommendation you hear tonight…
Implement your app as a DSL that extends the Rails framework. Make a
DSL for your business domain.

Get Started!

Learn Ruby!

Explore Rails as an implementation for internal tools.

Make quick demos to get early validation of your ideas.

Parallel Development: Go have a horse race. Race the Java team to get
attention. Do it for free to start.

Embedding Ruby: Scripting inside of other apps, like JRuby inside
Java. Helps you streamline your development.

CASE STUDY

JokeVision.com was a perfect opportunity to try RoR. They were
producing comedy video, originally targeting the cable TV market. Lots
of content, but no buyers. They needed a database-backed website to
engage viewers and gather new content. So they did it with RoR. It
remains to be seen whether JokeVision will succeed.

Remember the banana? We think we know how to do something, and we are
creatures of habit. But try something different. RoR should be taken
seriously. It's not a silver bullet, it hasn't crossed that chasm
beyond the early adopters, and so has a lot of risk. But it's a lot of
fun too.

Q & A

Q: Is it scalable?
A: It's more scalable for the size of apps that people would do in
short order. But there are going to be integration problems with more
complicated stuff. So I don't know. I was using an RoR based project
management website called Basecamp (basecamphq.com): SomeoneI
overloaded it because we they had too many milestones. The service was
basically unavailable for a day. That hurt my confidence in its
scalability. They did solve it, but you can find yourself outside RoR
technology pretty quickly when trying to scale.

Q: You can break the conventions if you really want to.
A: Yes that's true, it requires some extra effort to do so.

Q: What doesn't scale well?
A: Adding functionality to apps and changing requirements tends to
create scaling issues. Like when your requirements for performance,
volume, etc. change. For example, suddenly you find you have to handle
huge image files and suddenly there's no infrastructure to handle it.
More people can be trouble too: things don't scale easily to handle
more people working on a project.

Q: How do you use AJAX and libraries to make it look pretty?
A: I'm still exploring this stuff. Libraries like Prototype can give
an object-oriented feel to the javascript. RoR doesn't necessarily
have a clear advantage, library-wise.

Q: Any high-scale web apps out there?
A: Basecamp is big, and I hear Amazon and Yahoo are using it
experimentally.

Q: When do you know something can't scale any more? Where is the limit
point?
Audience Comment: Ruby is single-threaded, handles one request at a
time. So user scaling backed people up quickly, and you have to deal
with the single-threaded problem using other technology like
ApacheLib. This could change in the future.
A: This is one of the interesting things: like starting up the Ruby
interpreter in fast-cgi to solve problems, and this chips away at your
10x productivity. But the same tricks you've used before will work
here.
Audience Comment: There are some evolving technologies and people are
coming up with solutions for scaling issues. It's a hot issue about
RoR scalability.

Q: How mature are the tools for developing Ruby, other than Emacs?
A: All the usual tools work pretty well. I use RadRails which is a
module for Eclipse. TextMate in Mac OS is good. More and more
environments are out there to help you be productive. Create the
database, create a Rails app, then create a migration. It's very
rapid. It automatically creates unit tests. So you're using standard
extreme programming tools to build things.

Q: What do you use for Ruby development?
A: Emacs and Eclipse. And a lot of command lines.

Q: What about IntelliJ?
A: It's a great environment, so keep an eye on it. Rails generates a
console for you to allow you interactively create instances of a class
and manage them.

Q: Any famous Ruby failures?
Audience Comment: It's too new.
A: Worst I know of is my own experience with Basecamp, but that was
just a blip. I don't know how they resolved it, but they did.

Q: How about Rails as a cost-effective beta?
A: It's all about evaluating market acceptance. If you try something
and mess up, you get bad press and it's hard to come back. So you need
to build enough foundation to get started and to stay ahead of it.
It's risky.
Audience Comment: You can't afford to go dark for six months while
you're rebuilding.

Q: After the database is developed, do you still have the 10x
advantage?
A: No, not in my experience. In Java we had to build some code
generation to get it to work like Rails. Do I just switch to RoR? It
depends on how much pain you're experiencing in your current process.
Right now you need be in quite a bit of pain before risking a switch.
It's risky to do wholesale switches; better to ease into it with
something new.

Audience Comment: We're building a public site to track all CO
legislation. We'll see how it goes with scaling.

Audience Comment: I started a website starting in PHP and then JSP and
then stopped because it was just too hard. Then we switched to Ruby
and suddenly we found ourselves doing things we couldn't even have
imagined before. It sure got us off a plateau.

Q: Can you call DLL's and other compiled things?
A: Yes, you can extend Ruby with C extensions, embed Ruby in C. It's a
pretty good technology for building in those kinds of things.

Q: Any good books and tutorials?
A: That depends on your learning style. The "bible" is the Picaxe book
by Dave Thomas. Typographically strange, but pretty good. Also "Ruby
For Rails": good for understanding Ruby as you need it for working
with Rails. Also "Enterprise Integration with Ruby".

Audience Comment: Check out tryruby.hobix.com. It's got interactive
cartoon web pages on Ruby that guide you. It's very good.
Audience Comment: There are also good resources at rubyonrails.org.

A: Continuations and Closures and Blocks take some time for you to get
your brain around.