Re: Tales from the Dark Side

This requires a mandatory Cayenne/Click plug. No SOB's, just the code that
works ;-)

BTW, for those who couldn't use Cayenne for political reasons - we just
entered Apache incubator. Maybe that'll help you to pursuade your boss.

Andrus


> I admit it - I have a little play with Ruby On Rails every now and then -
> great for knocking up quick admin apps. Anyway, this post appeared on the
> RoR mailing list from an ex-WO developer. I thought it made interesting
> reading, moreso from the point that the fabled Hibernate/Tapestry route to
> open source nirvana is not as rosy as it seems....
>
> Enjoy,
> Geoff
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael Engelhart <[email protected]>
> Date: 15-Mar-2006 18:20
> Subject: Re: [Rails] [ANN] Gusto.com Rails Site
> To: [email protected]
>
> Hi NIck -
>
> Sure I would.
>
> Essentially we had been actively designing the back end database for this
> application which BTW, also includes a full-blown content management
> system
> that controls all aspects of the front facing gusto.com website.   We had
> a
> very large model (100+ tables) built up to support the business goals and
> had started prototyping the web application using Hibernate + Tapestry .
> I
> arrived at Hibernate + Tapestry from a desire to develop something that
> was
> "like" WebObjects because at the time there was a lot of uncertainty
> around
> the fate of WebObjects and I was also concerned that the community was so
> small I felt it would be hard to find skilled developers as we grew.
> WebObjects, in my opinion is the best Java based tool for building
> database
> driven sites but I couldn't risk using it since it was very poorly
> supported
> by Apple at the time.    So after a pretty good amount of research  I
> arrived at Tapestry + Hibernate being that me and my team were all Java
> developers for the last 5+ years.
>
> Tapestry is a very complex MVC framework that had some points that were
> similar to WebObjects but it also had all sorts of bizarre baggage like
> the
> "rewind" cycle that quickly became unacceptable to have to code around.
> Also in Tapestry the push is to make everything a component and most of
> the
> time, we weren't getting any reuse out of the components we were writing
> and
> had the added complexity of having to write and wire up a component which
> weren't trivial to code in most cases.   Also the much touted feature
> about
> Tapestry that your  designers have the ability to preview your templates
> in
> the browser without having to run the application also quickly became a
> farce due to the fact that to make the design work you needed to have a
> "fake data" in there.  I mean you can't design a page that requires a <ul>
> and yet have no list items so essentially you end up creating all this
> yucky
> fake template to be able to preview and in the end we ended up mocking
> things up in static HTML and moving it back into the Tapestry templates.
>
> As for HIbernate, well that was just a plain bad decision.    Hibernate
> while it does do lots of things and maybe is important if you have a
> legacy
> database that you need to code against, is also a very complex framework
> with which to code your application.   All of the developers on my team
> were
> very skilled programmers but everyone agreed Hibernate was not fun at all
> to
> work with.     Having to write a ServletFilter to close a database
> connection on the fly because otherwise Hibernate would throw
> LazyLoadExceptions was a constant annoyance.  The other thing I found
> irritating about Hibernate was the community.   Time after time when
> researching something in the forums I came to the conclusion that core
> developers were the most arrogant SOB's I'd ever come across.  It's one
> thing to be frustrated with newbies of which there were a lot, but to have
> many many threads that devolved into name calling by a committer was just
> absurd.
>
>
> So after 4-5 months of this, Ruby on Rails came to my attention as the
> news
> surrounding it increased.   I had been a big fan of Python and used it
> extensively when writing data mining code so I wasn't a stranger to
> scripting languages although at the time  I hadn't written any ruby code
> other then hello world a few years ago.
> But after seeing the video, I was tempted to download the framework and
> test
> it out.  It was clear pretty quickly that the framework had a lot of
> potential but I wasn't sure how to go about things so I put in front of my
> team an option to take 2 weeks off from further Java development to
> attempt
> a port of our 25,000 lines of code to Rails and to see how far we got for
> one and to also assess the flexibility and productivity increase if any.
> Keep in mind that none of us had every coded any Ruby.   We armed
> ourselves
> with copies of the PickAxe book, Agile Development with Rails and jumped
> in.
> The first decision made was to adhere to the naming conventions instead of
> trying to force our singluar based model and do all the rails
> workarounds.    That was one of the best decisions we made.   By writing
> some scripts against the schema it took about 2 days to modify the schema
> via a bunch of SQL scripts to support the Rails naming conventions.
> Once
> that was done, we quickly ported a huge section of the website in the
> first
> 2 weeks.   In all it took probably 4 weeks to port both the user site and
> the CMS back office application to Rails and it was all done with smiles
> on
> our faces.    No more Eclipse, no more XDoclet delays when making simple
> changes to a database table.     By the end of the port we had
> significantly
> improved the application while at the same time dropping roughly 15,000
> lines of code from the system which lowered the complexity of our
> application significantly.
>
> At the end of the day, the risk that we took has paid off in spades.  My
> team is happy at work every day and we are pumping out more code and
> features then I ever could have imagined was possible with such a small
> team.
>
> I think a lot of people worry about performance as did I.   Until we
> launched I was nervous about how this was going to scale but now I feel
> like
> it's going to scale very well and easily.   As has been said, the LAMP
> issue
> has been solved and with the application of a memcached our site was hit
> with Siege with 50 simultaneous requests and was delivering the hugely
> database centric pages in under 1 second all from one server.  But under a
> more realistic heavy load situation of 5 simultaneuous users we are seeing
> 200-300 ms response times.
>
>
> Thanks again to this great community for making development fun again!
> :-)
>
> Michael Engelhart
> CTO- Gusto.com
>
> On 3/15/06, Nick Sieger <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 3/14/06, Michael Engelhart < [email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > Hello -
>> >
>> > I wanted to announce a very large  web application that was built with
>> > Ruby on Rails and runs the site Gusto! http://www.gusto.com/ .   It
>> was
>> > deployed yesterday in a little over 4 months of development with 3
>> > developers.   The origins of the site were being developed in Java
>> using
>> > Hibernate + Tapestry and the decision was made to port the 100+ table
>> model
>> > to Rails to see if there were improvements in productivity and job
>> > satisfaction.
>> >
>>
>> Mike, would you be able to share some details of the decision-making
>> process around moving away from Java+Tapestry+Hibernate over to Rails?
>> We're all looking for good case studies and stories that will help us
>> sell
>> Ruby and Rails into existing Java shops.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> /Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>>
>>
>>
>
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