Opinions about Ruby/Ruby on Rails

[40hz]

Hi:

I just recently got "invited" to join in on a web project a few good friends are currently involved with. (Long story. Don't ask.  )

But in order to do so, I'd need to get fairly conversant with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. 

Now I'm not adverse to learning new things. But I'm also at the stage of my life where I'm not super gung-ho on learning yet another language unless it's one that could be so generally useful and productive that I'd be doing myself a disservice by not knowing more about it.

I've read up a bit on Ruby. The claims and the flames both seem to trend towards the extreme.

Is there anybody in the DoCo community that is either: using Ruby for something non-trivial, or has attempted to do so, that has an opinion on this language?

Many thanks. 

[Renegade]

Good question. I've wondered the same.

I get the impression that the RoR people tend to be somewhat fanboys. Could be wrong there.

Still, it sounds like it's very productive for web development.

Here's hoping that someone chimes in with an answer...

[f0dder]

I get the impression that the RoR people tend to be somewhat fanboys. Could be wrong there.

A lot of ruby developers are on macs - 'nuff said.

We're using RoR for part of our finals project, and the feelings are mixed. There's some interesting things languagewise, and rails definitely does speed up stuff by removing the need to write a lot of trivial gunk. But it's slow, especially on Windows machines, with apparently no proper ports around... and you'll need a full cygwin install if you want to do anything nontrivial involving Gems.

[mahesh2k]

The reason i hate ROR is that i find it really hard to deploy it on cpanel hosting sites. I was trying to deploy askbot question and answers script on site and i had hard time finding where to go and how to work on ROR.

[40hz]

@fodder: Wow! Good catch. These guys are on Macs now that you mention it.  

---------------------
And yeah... the performance issue. I thought it seemed a little sluggish in operation but I chalked it up to "early code" rather than an intrinsic issue with RoR. Gonna make it a point to broach that topic with them. Thx for the heads up on that point.

[Renegade]

I didn't want to mention the performance thing as I have no personal experience with it, but I've heard a few times that RoR is really good for prototyping, but the performance issues make it unsuitable for large deployments.

[f0dder]

I didn't want to mention the performance thing as I have no personal experience with it, but I've heard a few times that RoR is really good for prototyping, but the performance issues make it unsuitable for large deployments.

Mention that to a Ruby aficionado and you'll be told to throw more hardware at it.

There's (at least) two parts to the performance thing - one is the interpreted nature of Ruby; even though the language is from the mid nineties, the core distribution doesn't have an efficient interpreter/vm/whatever. The second is on Windows because of all the hellish cygwin DLLs, starting up the webrick takes a lot of time on my moderately-powered laptop - enough that it's a pain during development.

Oh, and the requirement for having a gcc environment to install gems probably means a lot less choices wrt. hosting of a ruby project than a simple PHP (or even asp.net) deployment.