Scobleizer - Latest Comments in I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

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Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Abhishek — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:54:19 -0000

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Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Thomas Lucero — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 03:31:32 -0000

I am in the process of early design/architecture of a multiplayer computer game. As part of my never-ending search for knowledge, I ran across ruby on the XProgramming.com site by Ron Jeffries, and that led me to Ruby on Rails, which led me to Ajaz... and fell in love with the ruby language syntax. I liked python, but either it or I was not up to enterprise/bet my paycheck standards for larger projects.

Anyhow, after reading enough of the Programming Ruby book, I decided to give Linux another chance (I'd tried a SuSe, version 4 or 5, and Mandrake, versions 6-8. I searched through my cd collection, found a copy of DSL Linux, noted that my newer computer had more than 50 mb free drive space, and used the Mepis burn instead.

Well, it had ruby 1.8.2 and, more importantly, did not have irb, RDoc and a couple other things. And the Debian apt-get said, sorry, ask again later. So I gritted my teeth and installed ruby from source. And it gave ruby -v -> 1.8.2. I modified Makefile to use /usr instead oof /usr/local. ruby -v -> 1.8.2. Hmmm.

After a snack, I modified config for /usr instead of /usr. ruby -v 1.8.4! I verified that Hello, world and irb ran, intalled gems and installed rails. Due to not using Linux/root for about 5 years, this project (from deciding I wanted Linux at home to getting a rails project running) took - almost 8 hours.

How long would it take, from deciding I needed a new version of Windows to installing a major new app on my new OS, with major glitches at each step? (I omitted the glitches for brevity). A week? Three weeks? $1500? An MSDN purchase?

Oh, yes. I was a software developer from 1974 to 2002. My last project was a conversion TO IBM 390 MVS (that's to, not from). Before that, I was a .NET developer (anyone want a few beta 2 coasters?).

Anyhow, I'm advising my friends to short MSFT and SUNW, and hedge with a long AMD. I expect major new developments will encourage sales of new computers. The biggest of these is new apps using ruby/rails/ajax flying out the door in 3-9 months.

Anyone hiring RoR programmers?

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Nitin — Thu, 25 May 2006 08:52:03 -0000

I am a software engg. and before days i m working in .NET but now days i m working in Rails. i Think its a more user friendly compair to .NET.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:08:40 -0000

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikez...

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:08:18 -0000

.NET on Xbox 360

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

MikeSchinkel — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:47:37 -0000

I hate to say this for many reasons (my company Xtras.Net sells .NET tools and also because the cult-leader-like behavior of the Rail creators), but Ruby On Rails has many, many things over ASP.NET 2.0. It appears it was designed as "pragmatic" as opposed to Microsoft's "visionary." What's more, the paradigm of ASP.NET is, IMO, all wrong. The forms/controls paradigm with VIEWSTATE and __DoPostBack() and very little use of real-world patterns. Microsoft usually solves 85% of the problem but then leaves developers to repeatedly reinvent the wheel with the remaining 15%. I think one of the key reasons is Microsoft's developer division architects don't actually use their tools to create real-world apps. The RoR folks do. Necessity is the mother of invention. What I think Microsoft should do is provide a grant to the MonoRail folks so they can add a bunch of full time programmers to the project so that it can grow and become a mature alternative to RoR. But if they do, Microsoft shouldn't control it. Instead, the team should look to get as many real-world projects implemented using MonoRail as possible, and offer seats on the paid developer team to people who would be a MonoRail liason between a real world project and also be on the MonoRail developer team. I'd sign up for that and rebuild www.xtras.net and www.howtoselectguides.com using MonoRail.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Tobin Harris — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:09:02 -0000

I love both RoR and .NET, but RoR is my first choice these days. I have only 2 points to contribute here:...

Discovering Rails shook my confidence in Microsoft. I remember thinking "Why isn't ASP.NET as nice as this? I almost *expect* Microsoft to be better than this little open source movement...". They have such abundance of good people and skills yet ASP.NET didn't come close to the elegance and feel-good-factor of Rails, in my opinion at least. That's not encouraging, I'm suddenly in a position where I'm questioning Microsofts ability to their job as a vendor of development tools.

One thing I do love about .NET over RoR is the abundence of polished, professional and robust components and libraries available. I know that if my client needs sophisticated multi-lingual reporting then I can go out and find 10 potential component vendors who will sell me something pretty solid, and respond to my support requests within 12 hours. This gives me confidence that I don't always get when developing a RoR app. However, I'd love to see a commercial component market open up around RoR that can offer such things!

There's my 2 pence worth!

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

M Marius — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:16:48 -0000

Hello, very interesting comments.

I am a team leader in a software company in Romania - we developed an ERP based on a client - server architecture (visual foxpro clients - oracle database).

The problem wich we are faced is that we need to make user interface on web for some parts of the ERP, but we want to maintain also the desktop applications.

We discussed about the strategy to take - and concluded that we need to develope a bussiness layer physically separated from the user interface and the data layer that we can use in the desktop applications and in the web applications.

In Visual Foxpro we want to use ComCodebook (free framework) to make dll's that we can use in an ASP.NET app (PHP/ASP, but we incline towards ASP.NET) as datasource bussines objects and also in our Visual Foxpro apps.

We already tried it on a small internal project to see how it works.

This would lead to .NET.

For now we don't have anyone who has worked before with asp.net apps or even with .net apps - so, if we take this route - we must all learn .net.

I am very excited with ROR after taking Curt Hibbs's tutorial - I feel my coleagues will too. I think the learning curve is be much flatter than on Asp.Net.

Before I can talk with my coleagues about ROR as an alternative I want to ask a couple of questions.

First question - ROR knows how to work with bussiness objects wrapped in dll's?

The second one - Is it even possible to make bussines logic code that we can use in ROR and in a Visual Foxpro app?

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Charles Stapleton — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 23:05:25 -0000

I've had a discussion with other people about this issue on the LLBLGen forums and the consensus seems to be that if you're developing a web only application and you don't need access all of the enterprise features then RoR is the way to go, which seems to be what everyone else has come to discussing this ASP .Net vs RoR issue.

But I'm always evaluating what can help, that's what attracted me about RoR in the first place.

I wish LLBLGen got more exposure because it's great at what it does: create an ORM layer. It doesn't try to be everything and that's why it's so perfect for ORM.

And as far as your bank using .aspx and brute forcing an attack, anyone could have done that on any platform, not just .Net. If you're suggesting that Visual Studio makes idiots out of programmers, I agree. I think that people should have a good background in using a command line and vi through CS courses in college, but once you've covered the theory and have a grasp on how it all works together VS is a great tool to assist you in developing/maintaining applications quickly.

You know part of the reason RoR interested me so much is because I really really want to get rid of my Toshiba laptop and get an iBook to write code. Certaintly not the most important reason, but a nice benefit.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Bob Aman — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:16:22 -0000

Regarding Charles Stapleton's comments above:

1. How does RoR give me a significant advantage over my current situation?

Assuming we're talking web applications here, because difficult-to-test presentation logic is better separated, IMHO, you can get a bit more thoroughness in your testing. It's not revolutionary, but it helps.

2. I use LLBLGen Pro to generate my ORM layer.

Sounds neat. I hadn't heard of LLBLGen Pro before, but it sounds fairly similar in nature to the concept of Rails' ActiveRecord, just a little less dynamic. In this case, Rails' main advantage on this point is likely to be cost and the ability to modify it, if necessary, since I assume LLBLGen Pro is not open-source.

3. Refactoring.

Depends. On the subject of row-level security, I'm pretty sure I saw a drop-in module for doing this in ActiveRecord just the other day. If I'm wrong on that one, a generic drop-in module would still not be all that difficult to write. Assuming the module fit your requirements, it possibly could have been a 30 minute job instead of a 12 hour job. Hard to say. But I'm quite sure it would not be longer than the 12 hour timeframe you quoted if you had to write it manually.

4. Wouldn’t it be difficult to always have to look up every name of every column?

That's one reason why I use multiple desktops and I keep my PostgreSQL frontend open whenever I'm coding in Rails. If I had to pick one thing that's nice about Visual Studio, it would hands-down, without question, be Intellisense. If you use the Rails plugin for Eclipse, I believe you get some of this back, but personally, I still prefer TextMate. I expect TextMate to be getting a superior clone of Intellisense pretty much any minute now. That one's only a matter of time. Obviously, though, if you're on Windows, TextMate is irrelevant.

5. We’ve never had a bug keep us down for more than an hour, nothing that is a show stopper.

The same can generally be said for Rails. Usually the exact location of the problem will be detailed in the stack traces found in the log files. Similarly, it's usually as simple as adding in a new unit test and fixing the bug.

6. .Net Remoting?

Ruby has DRb if you need it. But I would pick a RESTful webservice over remoting any day of the year at this point. I used to do a lot of work with .Net Remoting, and while I completely agree about the speed isue, I personally found the tight coupling to be much too scary for my tastes. The security thing might be a bit trickier.

7. Duplicating business logic in RoR just creates more places to have bugs.

No arguement there. Running C# code side-by-side with RoR code that does essentially the same thing would probably be a bad idea. Don't Repeat Yourself.

8. In my area I could be pulling down a salary of 80k-150k for a lead developer position.

RoR is a bit too new to tell for sure, but honestly, I would expect the salary to be about on par with C#. But there can be no doubt that RoR is growing by leaps and bounds and the demand for RoR people is picking up scary-fast.

"I want someone to prove me wrong because RoR is a great product."

Unfortunately, I doubt you'll find someone to "prove you wrong" because frankly, I think you probably made the most practical choice under the circumstances. You should always use the right tool for the job. And while I'm pretty certain that RoR is not a substantially worse choice, you already have preexisting code, and I see no sufficiently good reason to migrate it to Ruby. If you were starting something from scratch, I would probably have recommended RoR, if for no other reason than momentum, but under the circumstances, I think you made the right choice. But I would constantly keep reevaluating that choice -- three months from now, it could very well be the wrong one.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Bob Aman — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 11:35:58 -0000

I used to be pretty active in the C# world. I even tried my hand at writing an article for the Code Project at one point. (IMHO, a Code Project look-alike is one thing the open source, and especially Ruby/Rails community could really use. Maybe I'll write it. Should take me maybe a week or two with Rails.)

At the time, I considered C# to be a really strong contender compared to Java. It had it's problems, to be sure, not the least of which was Fusion, which I still consider as its real Achilles heel. Although there's also the ASP.Net deployment nightmares, and the difficulty in getting workable MVC stuff going in ASP.Net, and the obvious lack of XHTML support.

But overall, I thought it was workable. I got around the Fusion issues by just learning the ugly quirks inside and out. I got around the MVC issues by writing my own custom framework. And I got around the lack of XHTML support by pretty much throwing the entirety of ASP.Net out the window. If you haven't already figured it out by now, the main reason I was still hanging out in the .Net community by this point was the language itself. C# is reasonably nice. Yeah, it's an obvious rip-off of Java in many cases. But it's a damn fine rip-off. You guys stole the good parts of Java and ditched the cruft. The class library actually even makes sense. Kudos.

But then, one day, I was reading Slashdot. I don't normally read Slashdot, and if I do, it's a quick glance and back to whatever. But on this particular day, there was an article by Curt Hibbs on Rails. I had some free time, so I went through the tutorial. And in about twenty minutes, I was hooked. I mean, really, really hooked. Instead of having to hack half the system apart to get it to do what I needed/wanted, it was smart enough to get the hell out of my way and let me do whatever I damn well pleased. I don't need drag-and-drop crutches. The command line doesn't intimidate me, I know better. The worthless coders that just barely squeaked through CS or SE might need their hands held, but I don't.

In any case, long-story-short, a year later, I find myself using a PowerBook instead, because it has TextMate. For me, TextMate and the Unix command line were the killer apps that switched me off Windows and onto the Mac. Take note!

Rails works fine on Windows, but it has its quirks. And since I was deploying to a FreeBSD box, it was just a lot more sensible to switch to a system closer in nature to what I was deploying on.

In the end, the reason Microsoft .Net will fail is simple. It attempted to make coding so easy that anyone could do it. The guys who couldn't hack it in a CS theory class love this, and will rave about your product. But at the end of the day, all you've got is a bunch of guys, who should've switched majors, writing really bad code.

When I visit my bank's website, I see ".aspx" suffixing each URL. And then I see the login page "protected" by SSL that requires merely a 4 digit numeric pin number and the account number printed on every one of my checks. The site doesn't employ any countermeasures whatsoever against brute force password attacks, and I was able to pummel my way into my own bank account in about 10 minutes. I was never notified of the several thousand attempts to access my account with an incorrect password from the same IP address.

Attracting stupid coders is a patently stupid idea. Microsoft has only tried to hire the best of the best for its own coding talent for a long time, but when it comes to their own products, they try to lower the barriers to entry as low as they can make them. The result is insecure code written for an insecure platform and a mass migration of the smart guys in the room to open-source/Apple's products.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Charles Stapleton — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 13:28:59 -0000

I have been doing rails for about 2 weeks now, purchased the Agile book and have been playing around with it. There are a few reasons I will not be switching to ruby and I really hope someone can respond to this and prove me wrong because I always love to use the latest and greatest.

Some background about my business and position I'm in. I own my company, we are not a software company, we are a manufacturer; we do several million a year in sales with a minimal staff. I believe we accomplish what we do because, unlike others in our industry, our software is custom built and allows to have features others can't compete with except the few big players in our industry without needing the resources. I am a software engineer at heart, one of my degrees is in computer science and I have experience working for large enterprise apps and small startups.

Why I won't be doing new development or changing development to RoR:

1. Testing Before Deployment: I hire developers overseas, I currently have two full time developers on staff. One in Romania and one in India. Right now I can just check out their changes from source control, merge them with whatever little changes or bux fixes I have made, do a compile and it tells me right away what I need to fix. Once the compile time checks are done I do my unit tests with NUnit and fix any remaining errors. I do some basic UI testing or have one of my secretaries check the UI to make sure it works, then I deploy it over the weekend so when everyone comes in on Monday, it just works. How does RoR give me a significant advantage over my current situation?

2. Development and Maintenance Time: I use LLBLGen Pro to generate my ORM layer. There is no xml configuration, you point it at your database and it gives you objects that work right away. You can easily add validation and display information in a web page. It's the greatest thing ever and I've been using it for 9 months, has increased productivity incredibly. There are no stored procedures to write, you just dive into writing code. This combined with the number 1 above and our maintenance is a breeze.

3. Refactoring: A few months ago we expanded our software to allows sales people to use the intranet application to open up cases and track their sales and commissions and interact with the office staff while on the road. Problem was we had no real security. There was only admin and user, but now we needed row level security access. Meaning that certain users could see certain rows and not be mutually exclusive. While taking on this task we decided to add history tracking so we could see what users made changes and when. I did it over the weekend while I was visiting the inlaws. 12 hours to refactor the entire application so that every single table has a History table that stores all changes made and to implement row level security. Row level security gives our sales people access to just their customers, but gives our office access to all customers, and gives customers access to only their information.

4. Visual Studio: With Visual Studio I know exactly what properties all of my objects have so I don't have to think about it. Our application uses around 40 tables. Wouldn't it be difficult to always have to look up every name of every column?

5. Time: I only get to actually write software 1-2 hours a day because I'm on the phone, in meetings, traveling, etc. When there is a critical bug in the software that must be fixed asap I can fire up our exception tracking webpage and figure out exactly where the exception is occuring, even the values of the variables involved in the exception through .Net reflection and create a test case, repeat the problem, and then deploy the fix in a matter of about 15 minutes. Granted, some problems might take a little longer to solve, but we've never had a bug keep us down for more than an hour, nothing that is a show stopper.

6. Other applications: Our intranet application can be given access to the LLBLGen objects because it's within our internal network, but what about our applications that sit on hosted servers in datacenters? The web apps our customers access? They use .Net remoting, which is VERY fast and doesn't require us to write much more code. No need for web services with .Net remoting. Also, we have system services and a few desktop integrated apps (fedex and ups integration, some quickbooks integration for AP) that use the SAME objects our web platform does. It was wonderful to write the security into our objects and then have it automatically be used by report generation to ensure no one could generate and print reports they shouldn't be able to.

7. More bugs: Duplicating business logic in RoR just creates more places to have bugs. Having a standard set of objects in .Net that my ASP .Net, desktop apps, system services can use makes me feel much more confident.

8. Salary: This one doesn't matter for me, but I wonder why other people haven't mentioned it. I'm a developer at heart and I sometimes wonder what it would be like to go back to the world of programming so I occasionally check the job boards for C# and .Net software engineer positions. In my area I could be pulling down a salary of 80k-150k for a lead developer position. There just aren't enough .Net developers to fill the positions out there so you're going to get a great salary rather than learning RoR.

RoR was great initially. It let me get an app that could search our database for orders up and running quickly, could even let me display the order quickly, but then as soon as I needed to do something more indepth, for instance the security model or communicating with our other services, I found things to be the same level of difficulty (after overcoming the learning hurdles) as using LLBLGen because at least I had the Visual Studio IDE to tell me everything I needed to know about an object.

I want someone to prove me wrong because RoR is a great product, but sometimes working with it made me feel like I was working with a nice framework built around old ASP.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

lsta — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:33:05 -0000

Correction: In the 5th paragraph, "No or here" was supposed to say "No (font tags) or (center tags) here".

... and even as I talk about rails being simple and less code, I sure wrote a lot. Sorry :p

Blame it on the extra productivity :D

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

lsta — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:30:41 -0000

Wow. It was a lot of fun reading the past 70 posts or so. I agree with every one of them. I'll admit I haven't played around enough with ASP.NET 2.0, and I've seen people develop applications quickly in webcasts and videos at MSDN.

But when I try to follow along, to do it myself, it only goes that quickly until the demo ends. After that, I'm stuck drowning in the 20 different ways to do something that's almost what I want to do, but not quite. And of course, stuck in Visual Stuido, which as someone else mentioned above, is really a requirement for .NET development.

Glad to hear other Zeldman-Meyer types are attracted to Rails. I wouldn't be surprised if RoR has more designers and artists playing with it than .NET does. That's the beauty of simplicity.

Time after time, while working on a Rails application in Ruby, I find myself thinking, "That's it?" I expect so much more sweat, tears and code to do something simple ... but in Ruby, it really *is* that simple.

There's no pretense about creating a windows application with HTML, or the godawful avalon markup that reminds me of the worst HTML 3.2 I've ever seen. Designers know to separate presentation from data, with CSS and XHTML. No or here, thank you.

And .NET reminds me of PHP, in the way everything is included in a monster package. Rails relies heavily on packaging features as independent and easily upgradable parts. Rails itself isn't one thing, it's made up of 5-6 ruby "gems", like ActiveRecord for databases and ActionWebService.

You can download "plugins" for rails, make your own individual classes and modules in the \lib folder, or reuse parts of your application as engines or components. And it's not just Rails, you can easily install "gems" for Ruby, like Rails itself, and then use the new classes with just one line. RedCloth, for example: http://www.whytheluckystiff...

The best part? You only need to know one or two commands. "gem install redcloth" from any cmd prompt, and wham, it's done. No need for a web browser. "gem update" and you've just upgraded everything. Want to try writing an application for EdgeRails - the SVN version?

"rake freeze_edge" in your Rails application's folder, and now your local application is running edge rails from the /vendor folder. It's that easy. 1000x faster than installing a .NET 2.0 beta.

Worried that your web host doesn't have the exact gem and rails versions you need? "rake freeze_gems" and your rails gems are copied to /vendor. Other gems are easy to add, because they're packaged the same way, in one folder for easy xcopy. "rake" does even more, of course. Look over "rake --tasks" - from testing to doc generation to db maintenance, it can help you do it all, quickly.

Don't be afraid of the command line. It's fast, and really not half as scary as you think it is. Lost? Type a command or ruby script with --help at the end. Faster than waiting for MSDN to load ...

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Dody Gunawinata — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:08:42 -0000

ASP.Net however is still the most productive and powerful webframework framework if you require a lot of integration with other systems and workflow.

And right now I don't care about more libraries from Microsoft. Give us a more powerful and productive language (C# 3.0) and it will improve our productivity in .Net because we can express more with less code.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Dody Gunawinata — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:10:59 -0000

"How does the amount of config releate to the ability of the O/R to perform? "

It does because it tightens the turnaround from schema to code. Alter your table, and your object model automatically reflect that changes without a single line of code needed to be changed.

All your columns become your object model properties automatically. So if you want to have composite property (IUserType), just add to your model a property that return or assign values to other fields. And you can override the default column properties to return or access funky stuff that is not a primitive type. (Check out http://api.rubyonrails.com/ to see what you can do with ActiveRecord)

There is nothing that RoR can do that ASP.Net or other frameworks cannot do or emulate. It's how it does it is the key.

ActiveRecords supports 1:1,1:m,n:m relationships with hierarcy, list, and some estoric act_as_taggable mixins.

You model the relationships directly on your Model class definition with has_many Orders, has_one etc, etc

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Jeremy Dunck — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:03:25 -0000

http://diveintomark.org/arc...

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

dru — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:29:12 -0000

curt said:
"Why did you choose to use Linux if you are not comfortable with it? I do all of my Rails development on Windows, and the “Instant Rails” package makes development setup dead-simple:"

I needed to deploy my app to the web server, and this is where I got hosed. I was able to install on a windows box quite easily. :)

Dody said:

"Nope; wrong. There is no decent O/R support in .Net outside code generators like LLBLGen. Everything else needs bazillion pages of XML configuration."

How does the amount of config releate to the ability of the O/R to perform? I concur that a lot of XML need be written to NHibernate up and running, but I believe that is a problem that can be resolved. As for RoR's O/R support what do you do when you have to model complex relationships? I plead ignorance here but what if you need to store data in a non-standard way? Does RoR support the concept of IUserType that Hibernate has?

"db40 is an object db, not a O/R mapper. "
- I stand corrected :)

Ed W. said:
"If you don’t like the command line bits of RoR then check out RadRails for a phenominal RAD environment for rails:"

Very cool.

dru

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Curt Hibbs — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:00:06 -0000

dru said:
"I am a .Net developer that tried to get on the RoR band wagon but couldn’t even get the car started. I just could not get Linux and Apache or lighttpd and MySQL to work. The CLI of linux is very cool but ultimatly I need something that works."

Why did you choose to use Linux if you are not comfortable with it? I do all of my Rails development on Windows, and the "Instant Rails" package makes development setup dead-simple:

http://instantrails.rubyfor...

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Morten — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:54:46 -0000

Rails does not try to outsmart me. Rails does not try to invent its own web standards.

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Paul Robinson — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:52:31 -0000

I now develop everything in RoR.

I managed a development of an internet portal system for a University. I was employed for three years (until the end of this month!) and had a project budget of £1.2 million. We built in .NET and based most of the framework on Microsoft Content Management Server. It took 4 developers, 2 SQL boxes, several hundred thousand lines of code and many, many hundreds of thousands of pounds to get something that was so-so together.

I reimplemented the whole thing in RoR in about a week, on my own, and it was a quicker system when it was finished. I was able to develop on my feeble little iBook, deploy onto a FreeBSD server and plug it into MySQL. The finished product looked identical to the MS solution but was cheaper, quicker and more fun to develop.

.NET has come a long way since 2002 when we started out the project, but still - the trouble it caused me has left a bitter taste in my mouth. Part of the problem is that RoR'ers tend to be just better coders, whereas .NET'ers for hire tend to be people who learnt to code out of a book because it sounded like a neat idea.

There are lots of reasons why I am now a full-time RoRer, but principally:

- I can develop on the OS of my choice
- I can deploy to an OS of my customer's choice (even W2k3 if they need, but they normally ask for something which, you know, works)
- I can develop quicker
- Ruby is more fun to work with than ASP.NET by a long, long way. That makes me a more productive developer, which is a Good Thing.
- I don't need heavy hardware to develop or deploy with - I can get by with a puny 400Mhz celeron if I need to.
- It's completely free
- I have the source code to patch, work around, learn from
- My customers pay less which means I can now compete with off-shore developers on cost terms: if they're using .NET and I'm using RoR, I'll deliver a better system for less money and in 1/10th the time and yet I still have my nice European lifestyle. Sure the off-shorers will catch up, Rails is so quick I can spend more time talking to my customers and understanding their needs better, so I'll probably still win out.

It's a no-brainer. The fact MS can't see that .NET in its current form is a ridiculous proposition as a development platform for freelance and SME developers makes me laugh. .NET epitomises the Enterprise developer: close-minded, overly complicated, etc.

Start supporting mono, I'll think about coming back, but only if VS is ported to OS X and can run as smoothly on my iBook as Textmate does. :-)

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Ed W — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 07:50:47 -0000

If you don't like the command line bits of RoR then check out RadRails for a phenominal RAD environment for rails:

http://www.radrails.org/

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

George Moschovitis — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 06:29:55 -0000

Even though C# is nice, Ruby is even better. Check out another Ruby Web framework called Nitro:

http://www.nitrohq.com

Re: I made Phil Ripperger stand in line for an Xbox 360

Obie Fernandez — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 03:14:48 -0000

My take on why smart consultant firms are starting to win RoR gigs over .NET and Java is at
http://www.jroller.com/page...