I admit, when I read about and started looking at Merb, I was perplexed. I remain so. Can anyone actually cite specifics as to why Rob Conway’s famous pro-Rails/anti-Rails “potty mouth” post does not contain some truth, specifically regarding Rails performance. We all love Rails. But is it being over-hyped to the point where we are in denial about its significant faults?

– Sam

Rob’s post certainly does contain some truth, and I think I said as much when I commented on his blog.

But he took a lot of topics, smashed them with half-truths, and generally just said a couple of things to make sure he would get a response from the core team if not DHH himself.

I won’t rehash the whole thing, just leave you with this quote from Rob’s post:

There are other platforms that get it. ASP.NET gets it – and it scales amazingly. It’s easy to deploy, easy to work with, and the developer tools are free.

WTF? ASP.NET “gets it”? Gets what – how to write a web app in the worst manner possible? Free developer tools – what planet is Rob on? Yes, there’s a “free edition” if you’re not a professional developer (no unit testing, source control, etc.). This is what I mean by half-truths.

But it doesn’t really bother me. I’d actually prefer ALL of my competition to use .NET when they’re bidding against me on a project. :-)

Secondly, as for being in denial about faults – if you like Rails, then use it. If you like it better then anything else but don’t like parts of it, then submit a patch. The patch process is very simple and open to everyone. Don’t wait for someone else to fix the framework, YOU fix it. That’s only fair. Everyone else has already done a lot of work on it. Complaining about free open-source software is like complaining that the free steak you just got was a little bit too small and you’d like the chef to work overtime tonight while you wait for another.

Hi Jeff,

I absolutely agree that ASP.NET as a web development “platform” for developers SUCKS compared to Rails. That remark from Rob you quoted is blatant BS, no doubt! I guess what concerns me is we have our blinders on with respect to Rails and performance/scale issues. I totally understand that many of us won’t face the issues that twitter does. However, the Rails community cannot be in denial when one of the founders of Engine Yard goes off to build another framework largely inspired by Rails:

http://merbivore.com/

Best regards, Sam

Hey Sam,

I think I see what you’re saying now. I think it’s true that RoR is almost so easy, that it’s tempting to build a website and just throw it out there without being forced to think through the rest of your architecture. We tend to think of web applications as just the software. In the “real world” it’s the combination of software and hardware. I think DHH made an assumption that anyone trying to really deploy a large application would of course be on top of the hardware scene as well. But I also think it’s unfair for everyone to think twitter’s problem was a software problem when it was a hardware problem! So in this sense, I think Rails gets blamed too much for scalability when it’s never the software’s job to handle that (not in Rails, or Django, or .NET, or J2EE) – that’s what network architecture and application architecture is all about.

I think Merb is awesome. But I don’t think there would have been a Merb without Rails. Rails was designed for a rather narrow purpose: for database-backed web applications, and specifically the kind of web applications that 37signals needed. Not all of us build those types of apps, and I’m glad to see variants like Merb spring up, instead of trying to change Rails to be a one-size-fits-all solution (like, oh, I don’t know, .NET or Java).

And so, this is my long way of saying, I don’t think they are in denial as much as they just don’t care :-) They like it when someone goes off and invents something different like Merb, if only because it allows them to remain focused on what they care about and not what someone else cares about.

That’s just my two cents, anyway.

I want to point out the knocks on ASP.Net should really be directed at ASP.Net webforms. ASP.Net and .Net aren’t really the problem so much as WebForms are. The Castle Project’s MonoRail, inspired by rails, is a replacement for WebForms which is leagues better than WebForms. Of course, it still doesn’t give you the nice framework integrated tools like migrations and mvc code gen with unit test support.

MonoRail makes web development on .Net much better, but not to the degree that ror does.

I haven’t looked at MS MVC yet. still not rails though.