I know, right? I first learned how to rails back when Rails 3 was new, but didn’t end up using it (the backend of the project I was working on was indeed written in Rails, but by other people). Then when I worked at Big Nerd Ranch I picked up bits and pieces of knowledge from the former Highgroove folks, but again didn’t use it. The last time I worked on a real web app for real people, it was in node.js (and that was only really vending a React SPA, so it was really in React). The time before that: WebObjects.
The context of this project is that I had a few days to ninja out an end-to-end concept of a web application that’s going to be taken on by other members of my team to flesh out, so it had to be quick to write and easy to understand. My thought was that Rails is stable and trusted enough that however I write the app, with roughly no experience, would not diverge far from however anyone else with roughly no experience would do it, so there wouldn’t be too many surprises. That the testing story for Rails is solid, that websites in Rails are a well-understood problem.
Obviously I could’ve chosen any of a plethora of technologies and made my colleagues live with the choice, but that would potentially have sunk the project. Going overly hipster with BCHS, Seaside or Phoenix would have been enjoyable but left my team-mates with a much bigger challenge than “learn another C-like OOP language and the particular conventions of this three-tier framework”. Similarly, on the front end, I just wrote some raw JS that’s served by Rails’s asset pipeline, with no frameworks (though I did use Rails.ajax for async requests).
With a day and a half left, I’m done, and can land some bonus features to reduce the workload for my colleagues. Ruby is a joy to use, although it is starting to show some of the same warts that JS suffers from: compare the two ways to make a Ruby hash with the two ways to write JS functions. The inconsistency over brackets around message sends is annoying, too, but livable.
Weirdly testing in Rails seems to only be good for testing Ruby, not JS/Coffeescript/whatever you shove down the frontend. I ended up using the teaspoon gem to run Javascript tests using Jasmine, but it felt weird having to set all that up myself when Rails goes out of its way to make tests for you in Ruby-land. Yes, Rails is in Ruby. But Rails is a web framework, and JS is a necessary evil on the web.
Most of my other problems came from the incompatibility of Ruby versions (I quickly gave up on rvm and used Docker, writing a small wrapper script to run the CD pipeline and give other devs commands like ‘build’, ‘test’, ‘run’, ‘stop’, ‘migrate’) and the changes in Rails API between versions 3-5. A lot of content on blogs[*] and stackoverflow don’t specify the version of Rails or Ruby they’re talking about, so the recommendations may not work the same way.
[*] I found a lot of Rails blogs that just reiterate examples and usage of API that’s already present in the rdoc. I don’t know whether this is SEO poisoning, or people not knowing that the official documentation exists, or there being lots of low-quality blogs.
But overall, Railsing was fun and got me quickly to my destination.
