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    <title><![CDATA[Discussion on A fresh look at Rails and Ruby ]]></title>
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        <title><![CDATA[I like this article's approach]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357304]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Calling in varied opinions was a nice touch.  Makes for a well-rounded review.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357304]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[nwallette]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:11:49 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Development from an administrator's perspective]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357301]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[From more of an admin (vs. developer) perspective, I have different expectations of applications written for clients and servers.I can't wait for Java to die on the client side.  The whole appeal for Java was to be universal -- write once run anywhere.  Instead, every update installs side-by-side, taking up GBs of space and causing all kinds of versioning issues.  I can't count how many times I've had to yank and reinstall J2RE because yet another update came out and now App X won't run anymore.  Inexcusable.If you only run one application on your PC, and have tons of excess CPU and memory, .NET isn't bad.  But it seems like every .NET application just feels a little heavier than an equivalent written in native code.  And when I have 20 windows open, the disk just starts grinding every time I use an &quot;interpreted&quot; app that has been running minimized for a while, even when something like Chrome still feels pretty snappy.On a server, I expect to have to cater to the application a bit.  But I also don't want to see some framework/environment eating more memory and CPU time than the production applications.  Again, Java leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I also hate having to tune application VMs to make sure some process doesn't run out of allocated memory.  Don't modern OSes do an OK job of memory management already?Finally, having administered a development environment with developers using Oracle, NetBeans, Eclipse, WebFocus, MetaMatrix, etc. etc., I can definitely see the difference between code written by developers that like to be pampered by IDEs and environments that do everything under the sun, and those that have a bit more finesse.  It just seems like all the abstraction allows for lazy developers and sloppy code.There's a huge difference between benefiting from well-written reusable code, and languages with excess baggage.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357301]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[nwallette]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:07:00 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Thanks!]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357271]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[There is the little &quot;thumbs up&quot; next to the poster's name...]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3357271]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Sterling "chip" Camden]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:10:29 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Where's the 'Like' button?]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3356772]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Oh, hang on, this isn't FB.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3356772]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[mattohare@...]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:04:13 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Quite right]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3356300]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[I was pretty excited about Java at first, and I predicted that it would draw a huge market.  But I was also disappointed early on about some of the design decisions that limited the language to the point where it was fated to die by spaghetti suffocation.Whenever a language provider refuses to provide the tools that people want, they always invent them rather than settling for your way of doing things.  Unless the base system is naturally extensible (which was one of the things they left out), those add-ons tend to be unnaturally complex.  Result: cruft^nusers]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3356300]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Sterling "chip" Camden]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:29:12 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Correct]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355704]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Yup, I replied to the wrong item.J.Ja]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355704]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Justin James]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:25:32 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Actually, Java was a success -- at least at first.]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355668]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Look at what Java addressed: the problems of C++.Yes, it required less code than its &quot;hardware is (more) expensive&quot; predecessor.  It is years of building cruft -- not the original &quot;hardware is cheap&quot; design -- that led to the current state of Java, where it's debatable whether it saves any code weight over C++ (and a case could be made that it's worse than C++ for scaffolding code these days).That's not to say that I like Java.  It sucks, really.  Its early days were successful in the effort to make an improvement over C++, though. hardware is cheap does not produce less code, or cleaner code, it means throw hardware at the problem to make it go away.That's not a development decision.  I thought we were talking about software development -- not IT resource management.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355668]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:41:55 -0700</pubDate>
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        <title><![CDATA[I think you meant to address Jaqui with that.]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355666]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Your comment was posted as a reply to me, but I don't think it's me with whom you disagree.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355666]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:37:53 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[Use the rule of thumb, except when it doesn't work.]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355664]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[I take the rule of thumb that hardware is cheap as a working assumption.  If I start running into actual performance problems,  then  I start looking at where the bottlenecks occur.  There are, of course, certain cases where I know in advance that performance will suffer greatly if I do not account for it in development, and in those cases I will take care with my algorithm for performance purposes up front (a simple example in Ruby is using   instead of  +  for concatenations when the operation will be repeated many, many times) -- but otherwise I prefer clarity of code in advance over performance hacks in advance.As Donald Knuth said: &quot;Premature optimization is the root of all evil.&quot;  Focus on writing good code, tailored for the language you are using.  Only worry about optimizing performance for cases where you  know you need it, lest you end up with a tangled mess of spaghetti due to all the ugly performance hacks.Performance hacks have their place.  It's right after you've identified a performance problem and nailed down the problem to a particular, tested bottleneck.  It does not come one moment before that.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355664]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:34:58 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[A lot?  No.]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355662]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[I've built three complete Web applications in Rails, two of which made it to live status on the Internet, one of which stayed for long.  None of them were very big or fancy.  I've also started building two others, then threw away the design and started over using Ruby but not Rails.  Truth be told,  none  of them really  needed to be done in Rails; in my experience, eruby suffices perfectly well for the majority of cases where Rails is the first choice, and provides more flexibility in some ways.  I'm sure the experience of others varies greatly.. . . and, frankly, while I have some specific memories of the pain points and advantages to Rails, I don't have specific memories of the technical aspects needed to get it done.  I'd have to mostly learn from scratch again to get back to Rails development.As I mentioned where quoted in the article, Rails was my introduction to Ruby -- but I didn't stick with Rails for long.  Ruby, on the other hand, easily had enough going for it to keep me around.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355662]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:25:42 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[I used to agree, now, not so much]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355652]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[I used to think that all of these frameworks were horribly &quot;expensive&quot; and such. Then I learned and realized a few things:* The framework authors are almost always much smarter and much better than the typical coder, and their code will almost always be less buggy and perform better than something written per-application.* When a bug/performance fix gets made, it's nicer to have to apply it once at the framework level than on a per-app level.* Managed code environments are nothing more than very large interpreters, working with compiled bytecode instead of textual source code. If you don't object to an interpreted language, a MC system shouldn't bother you either.* J2EE and .NET do *not* load &quot;the entire framework&quot;. Just like any other system, they only load the libraries referenced by the developer. The *real* problem is that IDEs tend to include a few too many libraries by default to make life easier for the developer. Visual Studio, for example, includes at least 3 libraries which are not mandatory, baseline libraries to be running.* Unless you are the kind of person who thinks the government should pave perfectly fine roads as a form of &quot;economic stimulus&quot;, it makes little sense for thousands of developers world wide to write and rewrite (and test/debug/maintain/etc.) the exact same functionality to identical specs when a small team of developers can do it in a framework. &quot;Standing on the shoulders of giants&quot; and all of that.* Homebrewed systems almost never add value that a framework doesn't.* How many developers (as a percentage) work on systems so large that scaling issues truly matter? Where 10 MB of framework code is going to be a noticeable difference? What, are you writing server apps that run on 386's or something? The .NET and J2EE systems have not grown nearly at the same rate as hardware. Take the .NET 1.0 or 1.1 systems which were knocked as &quot;slow&quot; when they came out 8+ years ago, those apps run dandy now. On top of that, the runtimes have gotten much improved as well. C# code, for example, is about 10% - 5% slower than equivalent C++ code. I would expect that slowness in systems like Django and Rails come more from the interpreter than the framework... it's not like the code goes all over the possible code paths just for fun.In other words, yes, the framework adds some overhead, but I highly doubt that it adds so much overhead that the average developer would replicate the needed functionality AND have better performance characteristics, and at the same time, the improvements in the development process more than pay for any hardware costs (which there should not be) for anything smaller than a giant server app. The only time handrolling still makes sense if your company is so massive that dev time is hugely cheaper than hardware... I'm looking at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and a few others. A few thousand companies at most.J.Ja]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355652]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Justin James]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:21:24 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[You've done a lot of pre-3 Rails?]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355493]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[You have many sites going now? In honesty, I'm still on my first site.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355493]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[mattohare@...]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:21:35 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[This reads like to opposite political parties!]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355491]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Irresponsible Expensive Hardware focus leads to bit-shifting hacks. Irresponsible Inexpensive Hardware focus leads to a framework that is repetitive and bloated. And, it still seems to want a lot of scaffolding code.I wish we could get Rick Mercer to do something on this. The moderate approach is what we need here. Hardware is not so expensive to require bit shifting hacks. But it's not so cheep to allow php-style bloat hacking either.  That's why I like Rails. It could be more lean, but at least it's not ASP. It doesn't take loads of scaffolding. In trade for what it has in the framework, it does take out most of the code that used to put bugs into my aps.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355491]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[mattohare@...]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:15:24 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[look at]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355408]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[the father of &quot;hardware is cheap&quot; development, Java, and tell me that it's less code. since you have to INCLUDE every line of the jre/jvm/j2ee as a part of the app, if counting lines accurately.same goes for .NET, and all the other application frameworks.the entirey of the framework is part of the app.then look at the 2.5 GB Eclipse IDE, that becomes a part of any app written in it. [ if it's the Java language ]hardware is cheap does not produce less code, or cleaner code, it means throw hardware at the problem to make it go away.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355408]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Jaqui]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:07:08 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[I really couldn't say]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355331]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[I've never taken a close look at Spring.J.Ja]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355331]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Justin James]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:20:03 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[hah]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355232]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[The moment you start calling your development framework &quot;enterprise&quot;, I know that the buzzwordiness of the &quot;solution&quot; has gotten to be greater than its effectiveness and usability.There are very few cases, at least prior to Rails 3.0, where Rails is not better for the developers than Spring + J2EE.  Unfortunately, its intended purpose is to make J2EE usable for Web development, and that's a bit like trying to push a six ton boulder uphill with your hands tied behind your back.Spring itself, minus J2EE, is nice enough.  Its convention-over-configuration approach is a great way to design a Web development framework.  It still requires development in Java, though, which means that there are limits on how painless it can make the development process.  Java is just not a language that facilitates elegant Web application development very well.  While I have little use for the narrow problem domain that pre-3.0 Rails and Java Spring serve, if I had a need for a framework in that space and had to choose between those two, I'd go with Rails any day of the week -- all else being equal.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355232]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:54:00 -0700</pubDate>
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        <title><![CDATA[I have to disagree with that premise.]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355230]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[code written to H.I.E. will be much easier to maintain, and will be far more likely to not be as bug ridden as the H.I.C. code is. The &quot;hardware is expensive&quot; approach pressures the developer to use ugly performance hacks, and to start trying to shift bits with tweezers.  The end result is that you have to write a  lot more code than if you take the view that &quot;hardware is cheap&quot; and focus on writing clean, maintainable code instead.When writing that clean, maintainable code, you end up with a smaller codebase, a more elegant design expression in source code, and fewer implementation complexities that might otherwise produce -- and hide -- more bugs.I'd love to hear your explanation for why taking the &quot;hardware is expensive&quot; approach makes for more maintainable, less bug-ridden code.  Maybe you mean something different by &quot;hardware is cheap/expensive&quot; than the way I understand the terms.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355230]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:44:46 -0700</pubDate>
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    <item>
        <title><![CDATA[where rails takes away control]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355189]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[Actually, that's much of the reason I stopped using Rails for my Web development in Ruby: because it takes so much control away from the developer.  The Rails framework is great when your needs fit neatly within its very clearly defined design philosophy, but not when they don't.  My needs, in just about every case, have not fit within that design philosophy.  I know of others who have not had that problem, and happily, regularly develop Web applications in Rails.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355189]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[apotheon]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:39:43 -0700</pubDate>
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        <title><![CDATA[java spring?]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355215]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[you mean bloatware framework on top of bloatware language is usable?not by any sane person it isn't.]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355215]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Jaqui]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:22:21 -0700</pubDate>
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        <title><![CDATA[RE: A fresh look at Rails and Ruby]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355212]]></link>
        <description><![CDATA[How does Ruby on Rails compare with enterprise options like Java Spring?]]></description>
        <guid><![CDATA[http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-335697-3355212]]></guid>
        <dc:creator><![CDATA[Ubuntu Warrior]]></dc:creator>
        <pubDate>Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:16:29 -0700</pubDate>
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