Rails VS. .Net MVC

Rails
21

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 2:58 AM, Greg D. [email protected] wrote:

Ruby, the language, hasn’t changed that
much from 1.8.x to 1.9.x.

Bullshit. It’s changed immensely. Ruby 1.9 has fibers now, there are
native threads, there is unicode in fast C, no longer in Ruby. There
are actually so many new features in 1.9 people are pissed that it’s
not named 2.0.

Well I count three majour features:

  1. Performance
  2. Threads/Fiber
  3. Encoding/Unicode

and I can get all of those if I use the JRuby interpreter which is
compatible with Ruby 1.8.6. There are, obviously, a few language
improvements, but nothing I would consider major changes. The features
above are things I think should be there right from the start. Java
had them there right from the beginning.

I’ve been playing with all sorts of new 1.9 features
the past few weeks. Sadly one of them is not a working MySQL gem, but
it’ll catch up at some point I’m sure.

In other words: it isn’t mature enough, because there are still a lot
of gems that don’t work with it.

Do you follow Linux Kernel development at all? It’s a cardinal sin to
even attempt to change a userland API. Behind the API things evolve
immensely, but the API itself, that we as developers build software
against, never, ever changes. But then on the rare occasion that it
does change, you can bet your ass the version number will move by a
lot more than .1.

Well, I wouldn’t really compare a kernel with a framework like Rails.
The way I see it: the rails framework is in itself a piece of software
being developed in an agile fashion, and as we know all softwares
developed that way do change, and there are some things that will be
removed because they don’t actually make sense… Up until now, the
Rails development team have been delivering versions which are quite
stable and mature enough for you to develop a stable piece of
software.

When the Rails API begins to remain unchanged for even a few releases
in a row, maybe then you can start calling it things like “mature”.

Well, your concept of “mature” is quite different from mine. I think
the versions delivered are quite mature. The API, on the other hand,
may not be as mature, but we should expect some maturity with the
merge with Merb.

Fidel.

22

I think the strongest plus is the connection with the opensource
community. It’s not just about getting software for free - some
people would even make the (occasionally correct) arguement that it’s
worth what you paid for it…

  1. The opensource gets so many more competent eyes on the code that
    problems (and usually their solutions as well) are found very
    quickly.

  2. In addition, with open source developers are free to explore their
    own variants. These often lead to new extensions of the product that
    might not have surfaced from the original developers.

  3. Finally, the opensource community provides an invaluable informed
    community - we don’t just read the books, we read the code. We are
    able to separate the party line answer from the truth. Now if we
    could only get some social behavior patterns that aren’t so scary…

23

I want to thank everyone for their comments, they are very useful and
will
help me state my point. I did take the time last weekend to sit in on a
demonstration of building an asp.net mvc application. Overall I was
impressed with Microsoft pointing it’s self in the right direction of
web
development.

With that said I still think Microsoft has a long way to travel to catch
up
with Rails (especally because it is a moving target), plus it needs to
be
accepted by the masses for them to keep it around. I am seeing interest
in
it from the Microsoft developer community but many of them when they
hear
there is no viewstate they are immediately turned off. I see this as a
win
because the viewstate I.M.O. is not needed.

Again this discussion has helped me clarify my own thoughts and back
them.
The number of responses also show the involvement of the community to
help
one another not just with code but situations we will run into in the
real
world.

Thanks,
-Chris