Rails vs Ruby CGI

Question

I have a boss who is convinced learning Rails is too steep a learning curve and not cost effective from a labor standpoint when straight Ruby running as a CGI app on Apache is available. He is proposing, for our rewrite, that we use straight Ruby w/ no framework rather than Rails (or Merb, Sinatra, etc.) I believe in my heart that this is a bad idea but I'm having trouble putting my case into words. Some ideas I've come up with so far:

• Rails promotes better code reuse and better separation of concerns via MVC
• A shop running rails will look more attractive to the qualified job seeker, since Rails looks better on his/her resume, is more fun to work with, etc.
• (I may be wrong on this one) Rails will have better performance on Passenger because Passenger automatically pools connections to the database where as a handrolled CGI app would have to manage that itself or not at all resulting in worse performance.
• Rails is a proven technology, at least certainly more than a handrolled CGI framework

Are there any reasons I'm missing or wrong about? Are there valid tradeoffs I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

It's not a very steep learning curve. You might want to ask him to walk through a tutorial before making a decision.

Also, a big advantage is that RoR is a pretty popular system right now. Installing plugins is trivial, there are many deployment options already figured out--basically a lot of the work that isn't directly "Programming" will probably be easier.

And active record--it's so useful that it's difficult to imagine doing a web/database app without it any more.

Answer 2

There are occasionally good reasons for a company to roll their own framework instead of using a standard Rack-compliant framework. But "Rails has too steep a learning curve" is not one of them.

Doing it brute-force is actually more complex, rather than less. If your boss is really worried about learning curve, he should use the standard framework that has documentation and articles and screencasts and entire hosting companies dedicated to it.

Besides, Rails is dead easy to develop for. I've taught one-day workshops on Rails, and even people who have never programmed before have a working, deployed app by the end of the day. Experienced developers have an even easier time of it.

If your boss doesn't understand Rails, and rather than figure it out, he's giving you this line about Ruby over CGI...be careful. Technology left him behind 15 years ago, and he's no longer qualified to make technical decisions.

He should be moved into marketing without delay.

Answer 3

Using Ruby on Rails versus just Ruby is the difference between buying an automobile and welding a unicycle out of a single tire: both will get you where you are going.

At heart though, I think this is less a technological issue and more an issue of "managing up" as the decision NOT to use Rails is so laughably bad at this point as to be nonsensical.

I think you have two options:

1. Sort out a way to make it seem as if using Rails was your bosses idea all along. You might say something like: "Boss, I've heard what you've said and so instead of using full blown Rails, I'm just going to use it as a basic framework and do most of the work in straight Ruby."

2. Take the initiative to do a prototype of the development over a weekend, give your boss something provable that says: "This is clearly the way to go".

Good luck.

Answer 4

Does your boss have any reasons for his conviction? Other than "a feeling"? What are his real concerns - you won't have much success in changing his mind until you have worked out what his underlying concerns are. Don't be surprised if they turn out to be substantially different to what he's currently saying. He may have an irrational fear of Danes, for example.

Do you have any concrete reasons for disagreeing?

As a boss, I wouldn't be too swayed by the reasons you list so far: good design/coding practices don't need a framework, recruitment isn't your concern, performance optimisation? Don't do it? How more proven than CGI? (He might say, not me: I drink the Rails Kool-aid every day).

Is he technical in a current sense? I mean, will he be involved in coding the rewrite? If so, might he be open to a challenge? Pick a subset of features, buildable in a day or two and try it both ways. If he's not technical, why does he think your opinion is less valid than his?

If he's concerned from a cost/effort perspective, why does he believe that writing less code (and getting thousands of lines of useful, tested framework code for free) is more costly and/or more effortful than otherwise?

Someone else has already mentioned "managing up" - I suggest Googling for resources on ways to work on this.

Are there other members of a team involved? How do they feel?

Martin Fowler famously (in the Agile world at least) said something like "if your organization is not doing what you think it should, you should change your organization". There are at least two ways to read that...