Tag: ruby

I Admire the Ruby Community

(I have cross-posted this to the Oasis Digital blog.)

 

Over the last year or so, I’ve spent perhaps 50 hours rethinking what kind of business Oasis Digital should be. I’ve studied business models. I’ve made spreadsheets. I’ve looked around that numerous other consulting firms. The results of all that… are slowly emerging. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, though, I noticed something very interesting: the firms that appeal to me most, in terms of web site content, community involvement, portfolios, marketing approach, etc., are disproportionately Ruby or Ruby-Rails shops. I admire the “vibe” of the Ruby community:

  • Strong focus on design, to the extent that some Ruby-centric development firms have web sites which could pass for visual-design firms instead.
  • Ruby developers seem unusually aware of the extent to which syntax and conciseness matter.
  • There is much discussion of craftsmanship, though I’d need to survey a broader swath of production code to determine whether this discussion has a basis in reality.
  • Seemingly contrary to the above factors, Rubyists also appear to be unusually pragmatic.
  • This pragmatism translates to real-world financial impact: many developers make a good living with Ruby, and many firms are very happy with their Ruby projects.
  • Ruby events are numerous, nationwide.

There are numerous Ruby- or Ruby-Rails-centric development firms, and Oasis Digital is not one of them (we are perhaps a 5%-or-so Ruby shop, with Ruby expertise to effectively attack automated sysadmin, integration projects, and so on). We aren’t going to become a Ruby-centric-firm, either; and there are some technical aspects of Ruby that don’t impress me.

Rather, we want to bring some of the cultural qualities seen in the Ruby community, to other languages and tools. We care about design much more than most firms, and it shows in our GUIs. We care about user experience, and we are obsessed with quality, working results.

Ease of Installation: DokuWiki, PHP, files

In the past I’ve installed MediaWiki, ruwiki, git-wiki, and several other Wiki implementations (Perl, and Java implementations), with varying degrees of effort. For example, ruwiki required considerable gymnastics to get the right Ruby libraries in place on the machine I hosted it on, MediaWiki required a database, etc. Ruby libraries, databases, JVMs, and the like are all at the top of my toolbox so in most cases it’s just a few minutes and a few commands, which seems amply easy until compared wtih…

Yesterday I set up a DokuWiki instance (which stlruby.org might migrate to), and found that its underpinnings (PHP, plain text files) make for ridiculously easy installation:

  • wget
  • tar xzf
  • browse to install page, set a few settings
  • delete install page

Yet those underpinnings are very well suited to the task at hand. A typical Wiki does not need a database underneath it. As with many things, this reminded me of a general principle: use the least complex, most readily and commonly available, easiest to administrate technology appropriate for the task at hand.

Webby – Client-side, static content management system

This afternoon I rebuilt OasisDigital.com using Webby, stripping out hand-coded HTML and replacing it with much more maintainable Markdown. The site looks about the same as before (which is to say, mediocre), but under the hood it is much easier to update. We intend to use this new ease, to move forward in improving it. There is a general principle here, which applies broading in software development also:

If you need to make a change, but that change is difficult / tedious / risky to make, first improve the underlying system that makes it so.
(OasisDigital.com is a static web site; we have dynamic contact (issue trackers, etc.) to automate our work together and with our customer, but that content is on another domain.)

Webby is a client-side, simple CMS for generating static web sites, written in Ruby. Why serve a static site (plain old files on a web server) in 2008?

  • It minimizes the moving parts, there is almost nothing to break or maintain.
  • It is very unlikely that any hosting issue will break a static site.
  • It is easy to serve a static site fast (though our current host, TextDrive, sometimes is not all that fast).
  • Security vulnerabilities are very unlikely, in the absence of any executable content.
  • The canonical content (in this case, mostly Markdown) is stored in plain text files, which we track, diff, and merge in git.

In an earlier foray in to Drupal, we found that Drupal has extensive and useful capabilities, as well as a vibrant community, but it also has many moving parts; too many, in my judgment, to make it a good solution for building an essentially static web site.

Please, Use a Web Application Framework

Historically I have not been a fan of “frameworks”, and I have often repeated the following joke:

What’s the difference between an application and a framework?

An application is something a customer actually wants!

However, for some applications, I recommend use of an application framework. For some Oasis Digital projects, I require it:

Please, Use a Web Application Framework

My reasoning here applies specifically to web applications with many CRUD (create-read-update-delete) features, and an underlying database. The advice applies much more widely, and with many nuances and caveats, but this article I am discussing only CRUD-ish web applications. Even within this niche, my reasoning does not apply to web applications which “push the envelope” of what is possible or which attempt to advance the state of the art.

Regardless of the programming language, the application should be built on a framework. More specifically, the framework should popular and mainstream, with a community of developers, and the appearance of momentum for the future. Likewise, the client-side JavaScript used in these applications, should also be based on such a framework. Here are some examples:

Ruby: Ruby on Rails, IOWA

Python: Django, TurboGears, Pylons, TwistedWeb

PHP: Akelos, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, Zend

Java: Struts, Seam, Rife, Tapestry, Stripes, Wicket Spring MVC

JavaScript: Scriptaculous, Prototype, JQuery

This is just a list of some frameworks that I am aware of; I have not evaluated all of these in detail, and I do not endorse them; nor is this an exhaustive list. For Oasis Digital projects, we help evaluate proposed frameworks, then I personally give the go-ahead to use a particular framework for a particular project.

An in-house web application framework does not meet the “community of developers” criteria, except at the very largest firms. Everywhere else, you are better off with an off-the-shelf, popular framework than with an inhouse framework, even if the latter is brilliantly designed.

Justification

My recommendation (and requirement, for some projects) for using an application framework for this kind of application is not based on a fad. Rather it is based on my years of experience as a developer, a team leader, a maintainer, and most importantly, a customer of software development.

The wild success of some frameworks (such as Ruby on Rails) has shown that they can reduce the amount of code and time needed to develop an application. That second factor, the amount of code specific to the application, is at least as important as the development time. Lines of code are not an asset; they are a liability. Only the features that the code provides are an asset. The most valuable software provides a lot of features using the smallest possible amount of application-specific code.

Therefore, even if a developer is so extraordinarily fast that they can create a system very quickly without using an off-the-shelf framework, they still have provided less value by doing so, compared to creating that same system quickly with fewer lines of code.

Another benefit of using a common framework (not a custom, in-house framework) is that this makes an application much easier and faster for other developers are work on in the future. A more maintainable system is more valuable.

Framework Caveats

Vidar Hokstad left a lengthy and excellent comment below, disagreeing with my thesis. It turns out that I mostly agree with Vidar, and it sounds like he and I have been through many of the same experiences with poor application frameworks. There are a lot of things an application framework can do wrong, and sadly, many of them take the opportunity to do so. In-house frameworks created by “architecture astronauts” seems to be especially prone to these defects:

  • All-or-nothing: Some frameworks intentionally or accidentally make it hard to replace a section of the framework. Don’t use these. Use a framework instead that has a “library” philosophy, such that you are readily choose to use some parts but not others.
  • Just Different: There are frameworks which offer an API wrapper around the underlying mechanisms, which isn’t really any better, just different. In this case, different is worse. Writing to (for example) the com.acme.inhouse.servlet API is, all else equal, much worse than writing to the standard Java Servlet API. To be worth its weight, a framework API must be demonstrably and obviously more concise.
  • Lower Abstraction: There are frameworks which, ironically, lower the level of abstraction of the application code, because that code ends up working around the framework features to get the job done.
  • Pile of Pieces: There are frameworks in which it is necessary to shred your application in to a pile of pieces, and then wire those pieces together with configuration files. This is sometimes useful, but often makes the application harder to understand, not easier, especially if there are extensive “XML pushups” involved. (I’m looking at YOU, Struts!) Instead, choose a framework with convention-over-configuration, and one which offers but does not require manual wiring.
  • Keyhole Database Access: If you find you mostly use a frameworks’ DB access features, and as a result you have short, easy to change code, then keep it. But if you find you use extensive SQL to work around lots of framework issues, throw it out. If a framework intentionally makes it hard to reach to the underlying SQL access, throw it out now.
  • No Source: If someone proposes a framework for which you won’t have source code, laugh. Aloud. If this gets you fired, then it has set you on a path to find employment at a more enlightened organization.
  • Exceptionally Bad Exception Handling: Java frameworks are especially prone to issues with exception handling, in which the framework code “eats” exception details.

In summary, pick up a framework and use it to get your application up and running quickly, but don’t be stupid. Do what makes sense locally for your project over time. It is a win to use an application framework to reach “1.0” functionality, even if you end up removing or swapping out parts of it later.

Shoes, a new Ruby GUI toolkit

Last year I gave a talk on Ruby GUI toolkits, and concluded that none of those I looked at were compellingly slick or mature. There is a new player on the field now (thus certainly not mature, but interesting nonetheless): Shoes, from why the lucky stiff.

Shoes creates native applications with a Web feel. It is not built atop GTK, Qt, etc., but rather directly on the relevant native API (Win32 on Windows, for example). Shoes has a lot of potential, which it can realize only if a community accrues around it, leading to lots of polish and a rich widget set.

One thing that surprised me about the Shoes install it that, as far as I can tell, it includes its own Ruby install; I installed Shoes on a machine with no (obvious) Ruby installation and it worked.

Next Big Language = JavaScript

There’s a lot of buzz about Steve Yegge’s “port” of Rails to JavaScript, and Steve has now provided (in his funny, self-deprecating style) the background of how it came to be. He doesn’t quite say it explicitly in this post, but I think it reveals that the “Next Big Language” he has been hinting at is JavaScript.

I (mostly) agree:

JavaScript is in nearly every browser, including tiny ones (like the one in my BlackBerry Pearl). It may be the single most widely available language today.

Because of the above, an enormous population of JavaScript programmers (though sometimes of dubious skill) has emerged.

Starting with Java 6 it’s “in the box” there also. To me, this makes it the likely winner, by a wide margin, for a dynamic language to be used at Java shops or inside Java projects. Being “in the box” is a powerful advantage, one which the many other contenders will have a hard time overcoming.

Adobe’s new JavaScript virtual machine implementation, which they handed over to Mozilla as “Tamarin”, sounds like it will boost JavaScript performance great, making it good enough for a very wide variety of projects.

JavasScript uses curly braces, like the last few Big Languages.

Like Java, C, C++, etc., JavaScript has specs and multiple competing, complete, current, high quality implementations. This, to me, is a big advantage over Ruby, Python, and other currently popular dynamic languages. Of course there is plenty of room in the industry for these language to thrive also, I am not saying any of them will go away; we use Python with great results and expect to keep doing so.
Mark Volkmann initially thought I was nuts to predict JavaScript as a winner but came around a few month later (and said so in a user group talk).

In a project at work, we’d adopted JavaScript as our plugin extension language for user-customizable rules (billing rules, etc.). I’d have chosen Lua (as I did for another project), but there are at least 1000x as many JavaScript programs out there. So far it has worked very well. If we had it to do over we might implement far more of the project in JavaScript.

However, there are a few reasons why I only “mostly” agree:

First, with JavaScript there isn’t a good way to avoid shipping source code. Sure, you an obfuscate JavaScript with various tools, but the results remains far for amenable to readable-source recovery than in a more traditionally compiled language. For open source projects this is no big deal, but there are also many worthwhile businesses and projects which depend on proprietary, not open software (including most of our projects), and it’s not year clear that obfuscation is sufficient protection. (Update in reply to a comment below: This matters even for server-side software, because some of us create and sell software products for other people to run on their servers.)

Second, at the moment JavaScript appears to lack a module system, without which it’s painful to build large systems. I expect an upcoming language version will address this.