Rails, You Have Turned into Java. Congratulations! « Discursive

Rails isn’t the easy framework it once was, age has brought along a good deal of complexity both in the way Rails applications are deployed and in the number of technologies you need to assemble together to get anything meaningful done.

Update (2/20/13): Hello all, one additional note.   I’m surprised to be saying this, but I think the key difference between Rails and Java is that the Java “ecosystem” has this imperfect, somewhat ad-hoc standards group called the JCP.  This means that Hibernate and MyBatis or Spring and Oracle aren’t just pulling another framework out of thin air, they have to agree on standards and APIs.   This slows things down a bit, but, in the long run, this makes things more interchangeable.   It’s odd for me to write this because I’ve railed against the JCP for years, but I do think that Rails is a picture of what happens to “frameworks” in the absence of standards.   Call me old for saying it, but I did.  So there.

Frameworks atop Frameworks atop Opaque Hosting Platforms

Sure, Rails itself is straightforward, but the frameworks you slap on top of it can quickly become burdensome abstractions:  RefineryCMS, Devise, Omniauth, Carrierwave, Unicorn, Rack Rewrite, Fog, New Relic, Foreman, AMQP, and Honeybadger, not to mention the extra magic that Heroku gems throw into the mix (backups and other fun).

Why is the site slow today?  I don’t know maybe AWS is having problems?  Nope.  Ok, maybe the Unicorn configuration is screwy?  No.   Alright, everything works except Refinery take a look at New Relic.   That didn’t help.   Ok, let’s restart the application.   Great, that fixed it.  Why?  Not sure.  Was it a worker thread that was stuck?  Who knows, and who cares the site works now…

Maybe I’m reacting more to Heroku’s recent unpredictably and mysterious performance issues.   Maybe, I’m not fully dissatisfied with Rails or Ruby, but I can’t help but notice that Rails has become heavier these days.

Is it the complexity that Refinery brings to the table?  Maybe.  Refinery does what it does, but it is something of a beast.   If you follow the rules closely, you’ll end up developing a Rails application with an excessive number of Engines, which is really just another way of saying that you’ll be fumbling through a messy file explosion.  (What view is that engine in?   Hold on, let me click through five levels of folders….)    There are those of you who will shout “Sinatra, you should use Sinatra?”  But that’s really not what I came to Rails for.

I know I have unrealistic expectations.  I want it all, and I want it to be easy: I want straightforward defaults, but I also want customizations to be things I can understand.    Take the intersection of Devise, Refinery, and Omniauth as an example.  All three of these frameworks are first-class, don’t get me wrong.   (I lied, Devise and Omniauth are first-class, and Refinery is an awful mess.) Making them work seamlessly together is an obtuse nightmare  - a documentation desert littered with wreckage.

Frameworks that Eat Frameworks don’t like it when you Customize the Frameworks they Eat

The problem is really that once you start making use of Rails and all of the frameworks built atop of Rails you end up creating an opaque mess of customization.   One framework, say Refinery depends on something like Devise.   Customize anything and good luck upgrading.

Who really knows what happens during the login process?  Oh, I know, we’ll use RubyMine to step through this unpredictable mess.     I need to make a simple change to how routes work… oh look Routes have become incomprehensible because you now have 12 difference Refinery engines.

You’ll find yourself staring at incomprehensible mega-frameworks maintained by developers who are unapologetic about how little they care for writing documentation.     You’ll also end up with the most common pattern from Hell: the single Rails application that runs an entire business.

I’m starting to think that Rails has turned into the new Java, and that it is time to return to Java and ask it a simple question…

…Java, have you learned to “easy” yet?