Why I'm Moving to Ruby On Rails

Well, this is a hard post to write. After months of investigating, soul-searching, and examining, I've decided to move future application development to Ruby On Rails.

This was not an easy decision--at all. I know ColdFusion pretty well and have a lot invested in it. There's a great sense of loyalty to ColdFusion -- and the many CFers I've grown to be friends with and respect. I know many of you will want to know what the reasons for the decision are.

1. RoR is the fastest way I've found to develop applications. The framework is incredibly well thought-out and handles a great deal of the grunt work for me. That means I get to capture the time savings and apply it to concentrating on what I want to accomplish, especially the user interface experience.

2. RoR's ActiveRecord pattern. Boy, did I HATE this at first. I "railed" against it, but the incredible ease of persisting objects finally wore me down and won me over. Even complex relationships between objects are easily handled.

3. Ruby itself. Much has been written about how Ruby brings "joy" back to programming. When I first read this, I thought, "Oh, please...This is a language, not a religion." And, no, it's not a religion, but it's a really well thought-out language that just is so nice to work with. If you've used jQuery and are a fan of that (as I most certainly am), RoR seems like jQuery for the server.

4. RoR's way of dealing with databases. RoR has a notion of "migrations" -- Ruby code that creates and maintains databases. Each time you want to make a change, a separate migration is created. Each migration has an "up" and a "down" method. "Up" makes the changes; "down" rolls them back. The database is, in large part, abstracted away.

5. Plugins. Need to do something tricky? Chances are someone has already done it -- and made it available as a Rails plugin. And Gems is a terrific way of installing/maintaining plugins effortlessly.

6. The myriad of "little things". Helpers that eliminate cross-scripting attacks, easy form validation, closures, the ease of responding to different formats: HTML, XML, web service, etc., nested RESTful resources, built-in testing, fixtures for populating databases -- I could go on and on. As I said, this is a really well thought-out framework.

But this was a hard switch for me to make. Really hard. I didn't "get" RoR at all at first. My friend, John Quarto vonTivadar, coached me through a lot of this and had to put up with me railing against Rails for a long time. At one point, completely frustrated, I told John I was going to write a book: David Heinnemeir Hansen Must Die".

"DHH", as the Railies call him, is the author of Rails. In the beginning of my journey with Rails, I decided he must die because Rails is just so freaking big and does so much, making it -- for me -- hard to learn. I kept fighting Rails. "Why is it like this?" I found that resisting the urge to evaluate BEFORE I had fully learned the framework helped me. (John can attest to just how long this realization took to occur.) By the time I'd grown to really appreciate Rails, John asked me, "So does DHH still have to die?"

"Yes -- because he's so damned much smarter than the rest of us!"

There are some things I like and don't like, also. The Rails community is incredibly excited, active -- but that has, at times, overflowed into a "We're better than you!" mentality. But I think that's just natural excess and I see no signs of that from the thought leaders in the Rails community (people like DHH or Yehuda Katz).

Having read 4-5 books on RoR, I'm still waiting for one REALLY good one that doesn't start with "Let's create a Rails app in x minutes and don't worry about all the magic code in there." I don't much like magic code: I want to know what's going on and it's really NOT necessary for me to "get an app running". I know what running apps are like. And I know that an app done in x minutes is one I'm not going to be creating very often -- so don't skip over things so easily.

So, I'm leaving ColdFusion with greatly mixed feelings. I really cherish all of those of you I've gotten to know over the years. I have great respect for CFers who, to an inspiring degree, are in the business of delivering great applications -- often without getting the respect they deserve. I'll probably be posting from time to time on RoR but don't have any plans for teaching it: I just want to immerse myself in it and, like you, create great applications.

And let me take this opportunity to thank all of you. The CF community has been incredibly warm and welcoming to me. There are some really great people who do an enormous amount for the community. Knowing that I will leave out so many worthy of recognition, let me say a personal "thank you" to Ray Camden, Joe Rinehart, Matt Woodward, Michael and Judith Dinowitz, Ben Nadel, Clark Valberg, Liz Fredericks -- ah, there are too many to mention. I may be leaving, but the CF community continues to thrive and I wish only the very, very best for you all.

With sincerest warm wishes,

Hal