A scathing rant against Rails from the comp.lang.lisp newsgroup.

The Ruby community responds to Dreamhost’s complaints about Rails deployment. I actually thought that Dreamhost’s complaints were constructive¹, they run a large-scale host, and they get the Debian-aspects of it really well. I would be much more interested in Rails if deployment was as easy as bootstrapping is.

1. Not everyone did ↩

Dreamhost rants about How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better. An interesting perspective from one of the largest vhosting companies out there.

One of the best developers I know pointed me to a Django tutorial. Django is a Python-based Rails equivalent, that’s even less imposing than Rails. It’s a good corollary framework to Rails,¹ as the approach is different enough to make you think a bit.

1. Especially useful if you’re still trying to find a good framework, or thinking about design approaches ↩

Merb is yet another framework, a new alternative to Rails.

A good analysis of Rail’s implementation of Active Record. His measure is that it’s the “Visual basic of Object Relation Mapping,” and he sums it up nicely with:

Given that Ruby fans like the idea of domain specific languages, which let you work in a super high level language customized to the problem domain, it’s surprising that Rails groupthink is that SQL is bad. It’s actually a very high level language, and allows a well written database to do some pretty amazing optimization on the fly because it provides a strong layer of abstraction between what you requested and how the storage engine provides it.

I think that if Rails switched from their Ruby-based ActiveRecord to something based in SQL, that it would be a damned tempting framework. But as it stands, I’m not sure I want to wrestle with ActiveRecord to do what I can do in SQL quickly and clearly already.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails - O’Reilly Ruby. A seemingly unbalanced story of switching away from Rails.

A peek at 37Signal’s bleeding-edge use of rails/prototype/etc., a good incentive to learn the tools. Their software is excellent.

A very thorough Rails rant by a Perl developer (in the JoelOnSoftware groups), including a lengthy set of comments. The rant mirrors a lot of what I’ve found with Rails, which is that it’s a great fit for the simple stuff (but not so much for harder problems).

TrimPath Junction is the Javascript “Rails” clone. Looks … interesting.