Comments on: I’m Smarter Than Rails

By: alexch

alexch — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:24:43 +0000

I don't think I'm playing semantics. Call it what you like, but Sinatra's scope is vastly smaller than Rails'. Sinatra just does routing. Rails does routing plus views plus ORM plus a whole lot else. Personally, I find that extra stuff oppressive rather than liberating, for several reasons:

(a) personal aesthetics about design (e.g. why aren't views objects?)

(b) too much invisible magic (i like convention, but what's so bad about configuration as long as it's concise?)

(c) Rails' absence of clean or consistent APIs (see my reply to graysky, and also all the many different and undocumented semantics for view helper methods)

An analogy -- admittedly imperfect -- is Sinatra is to Rails as Servlets are to J2EE.

With Rack and Sinatra and enough good gems, and just a little bit of glue code, anyone can write their own little framework. So... what's the point of Rails again?

By: bryanl

bryanl — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:26:22 +0000

I would be to differ. Sinatra is a web framework. Calling it “just a library” is playing semantics.

By: alexch

alexch — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:20:53 +0000

Absolutely. By far the majority of our time spent coding Erector was figuring out how to plug a new View type into the godawful mess of spaghetti that is ActionController. And then doing it again and again whenever there was a new release of Rails.

By: alexch

alexch — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:18:13 +0000

Sinatra is not a framework. It's just a library. Who needs frameworks?

See http://github.com/alexch/vegas for my lame lightning talk attempt at proving you can have an app with all the power of Rails without any Rails in it.

By: graysky

graysky — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:03:46 +0000

I agree in principle, but without a Rails API in practice this can difficult.

For example, we use the "multi_db" plugin (like masochism) to transparently load balance between a master and slave(s). AFAIK, there is no way to have a plugin to do this without reaching into the guts of Rails and change the behavior of the db connection. This is fragile, and doesn't always make upgrading easy but what's a better alternative?

Even as a plugin author it can be tricky to know what is fair game to reference. Obviously, methods that are private or protected are likely to change, but about public methods? Are those all API?

You're certainly right that there are very unnecessary ventures into "C" territory, but even when trying to stay on the golden path, it isn't always very well marked.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:34:45 +0000

I think we both have some experience with ISTR given our time together at RHG so without going into too much detail, you hit the nail on the head with this one. It was a valuable lesson though in that I will never again venture so far off the 'rails' as we did all too often there.

By: bryanl

bryanl — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:32:35 +0000

Of course this applies to other frameworks as well. Smart-Aleck…

By: atmos

atmos — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:27:41 +0000

Don't forget the D) option, use sinatra, ramaze or merb.