Derailed

I’m sure that many of you have heard about Ruby on Rails, which a wildly popular web application framework built around the Ruby programming language and having some primitive ties to my preferred editor, TextMate. Well to listen to a lot of people on the internet, you’d think that the thing could cure the sick and end world hunger. And granted – I haven’t been able to prove that it can’t do those things, but in general I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

First of all, it is balls out a competitor for my non-published, yet to be fully realized echo! framework that I have just started taking more serious steps on. Of course, I am not sure that I want to release echo! into the wild anyway, but the fact remains that this Rails business is a clear invasion of my turf.

Secondly, while I am starting to crush on Ruby a bit (more on that at another time), something about Rails doesn’t feel right with me. I haven’t tried using it, so I suppose I have no right to comment. But sometimes you get a feeling about a framework… do you know what I’m saying? No. I’m not surprised.

However, today I came a across a link via SillyBean about someone railing into rails (sorry) and making some clever points. Obviously I was interested to hear from someone else who wasn’t pleased with Rails even if it was for legitimate reasons. I got into about three paragraphs and then came across this gem which literally caused me to laugh out loud for a period of time which might have bordered on inappropriate.

If Rails is already taking a latex glove to my db schema, how about feeling up those foreign key constraints I set up? Kind of a good hint about how to arrange has_many and belongs_to associations, ain’t it?1

You should probably read the whole article to appreciate the context, but even on it own, reading it again now it is amusing. Not that I suspect this will do much to change the course of development for this framework, but it is good to see the other side of the coin. It makes it more real.