The power of Rails isn't Rails

My team is primarily a Java team (we write servers and services) so when we have to do some web work it always ends up being with a Java web framework, some reasonable, some not so good.

There are a lot of reasons to choose Java, it's stable, it's very well understood (by the people who care to dig into it's internals) and it's brilliant for long running processes like servers. What it's not good at, it seems, is web. Of all of the mainstream languages, Java seems to have the worst web frameworks, the worst view engines and the most over-thought data access conventions. If there's one saving grace in the enterprise Java landscape it's Spring, but even their best (Spring @MVC), while better or even the best in the Java landscape, it never quite feels like the right tool for the job.

Given this, the Spring team created ROO, a project to add code generation to Spring MVC. While it may not be the case here, many other web frameworks looked at the Power of Rails project and asset generation and thought "YES! That's the secret sauce!", and it turns out they're wrong. Spring ROO generates a whole load of code, it manages your DAO layer, but even with all of that power, it's real world use case has by many been deemed prototyping, not enterprise project ready. I felt the same way when I tried to use it, easy to get running, hard to keep progressing. Turns out all of the code generation in the world isn't the secret sauce.

There are two factors that I believe make Rails a killer web framework.

The first is The Community (yes, proper noun). The Rails lighthouse shows over 800 open bug tickets. I've seen people mock this fact (ROO in contrast appears to have 240, and I couldn't find the ASP.net one...) but the nature of The Community is that bugs, when found, are reported, usually with a failing test and possibly a patch for good measure. The number of found bugs (along with the rate of commits on the Rails Github account) is actually a positive sign, it means that The Community as a whole is invested in the success of Rails, and is working together to improve it rather than letting it atrophy or ignoring the issues with it and working around them. This leads to a vibrant piece of software that is a joy to use, that while not perfect, won't settle for average.

The second reason is that Rails, for multiple reasons, naturally lends itself towards a style of application that allows you to maintain the original "Wow I got that project running fast!" feeling (PM types: read "Project Velocity") for the entire duration of the Project. This seems to be why people who love agile seem to gravitate towards Rails, your burndown chart isn't logarithmic, it's flatter, more predictable, and more accurate (until the client changes their mind) than that old Gannt chart.

For the same reason that excites customers and project managers is why developers love it, because we love adding features, getting a product past just enough to the wow stage. Working a lot with legacy code teaches you the value of testability, simplicity, readability, and other agile-ilities, so anything that promotes these things to the extent that Rails does or that lets us add value to a product at the same rate regardless of the age or size of a codebase is a good thing, for everyone.

I believe that any framework garners all of it's power from the language that it sits on. A Java based web framework will be constrained by Java's inherit strengths and limitations. Likewise, a Ruby based web framework will live and die by Ruby's strengths and limitations.

It seems for the web, that Ruby's strengths are paramount to it's success, and it's limitations can be lived with.