Everyone loves Ruby on Rails. It seems to be in the same space as Python a year ago – it’s the hip, ‘in’ thing and everyone needs to learn about it. And when it works, it#039s fantastic. And when it doesn’t… well, you don’t need to Google far to hear the screams.
And that is (IMHO) it’s major weakness. The documentation is built around everything going well. Should everything go tits up then you’re on your own.
Example: I was trying to put together a demo to show off at work. Unfortunately the server refused to start thanks to a parse error in the database.yml file. In the end I just copied and pasted a working one and changed the DB name. One assumes a control character had slipped in there and was breaking it but God knows how, given I rebuilt the file from scratch a couple of times.
Or the generate script – a new version of Rails made another argument mandatory (for the ‘scaffold’ target from memory). However if you left out this argument (as you could for previous versions) you got an exception instead of a sensible usage message. Whoops.
It’s a nice framework to use though. It’s nice to get away from endless XML. But I wouldn’t dare expose it to an enterprise development team for real work until it’s a little more fault tolerant…
