DHH addresses Dreamhost's criticism of Rails | Hacker News Reader

DHH addresses Dreamhost's criticism of Rails

loudthinking.com

39 pointspius28 comments

If Rails works reliably with SCGI but not FastCGI it can't be that difficult to fix. That's probably the easiest way to get it working for them. Dreamhost could just pledge $10k to have any FastCGI bugs fixed. They're the crappy shared host trying to live in a VPS/dedicated world. I agree with DHH that they should put up or shut up.

Everyone who sticks with web development long enough outgrows shared hosting, but they are a good cheap option for when you're starting out. The fact that you don't see the same sorts of problems from every other server-side scripting option (except maybe the Lisps) makes the Rails position seem more unreasonable.

RimuHosting and Slicehost are top Xen VPS Hosting for cheap. Both have great rails and django communities to help.

I've found RimuHosting to be worth the small premium for sure. I've never had a support request take more than 15 minutes to be fully resolved in a competent and friendly manner... how many hosts can that be said of?

So yeah, I highly recommend RimuHosting for Rails hosting or anything else you might need a VPS for.

I seem to have heard the same kind of answer from the Rails community before: "do it yourself if you really care". I don't blame DHH for it, but I think it is interesting to note the difference to the major Java frameworks I know, like Spring. I think they care a lot more about their community and the popularity of their framework.

Apparently since DHH built Rails for his own use, he doesn't care if anybody else uses it or not. Although I wonder how much the popularity of Rails contributes to the success of 37signals - would anybody even know about their web applications if it wasn't for the Rails hype?

In any case, that kind of thing is why people still choose Java over Ruby.

I think this is merely the difference between a framework that is fundamentally open source and a framework that is fundamentally vendor-supported (e.g. SpringSource writing and supporting Spring). From my perspective, the Rails Core team cares quite a bit about their community, as their community is themselves. Any developer who has a patch or plugin is free to make it available. That's the beauty of open source.

I don't really understand the difference, as Spring is open source as well? However, I guess SpringSource makes money from consulting, so it is in their interest to have as many people as possible adapt Spring?

I'm not hugely familiar with Spring, but the impression I get is that it's not really open source. SpringSource, as a commercial entity, essentially controls the authoring of the framework and has a financial interest in adding features that will drive the widest user adoption possible. If this is wrong, please feel free to correct me.

As far as I know, it is completely open source - not even semi open source like MySQL, where they have a commercial and a public license, or like jBoss, where you would have to pay for proper documentation. I think 37signals controls the source of Rails, so again, where is the difference?

I just checked, Spring has the Apache 2.0 license, which is very liberal I think (for example, not as restrictive as the GPL with it'S virality).

Of course the interests of SpringSource and 37signals are probably very different, although I think Rails is good publicity for 37signals (if not the only publicity).

If SpringSource lives on consulting, of course the question is allowed if the features they add are tailored towards making consulting necessary (as I think is a bit the case with the J2EE specification). My impression so far has not been like that, though.

37signals actually does not control Rails. There's no vendor behind it that stands to (directly) make money if more people adopt it.

One thing to remember about Rails was the context in which it was conceived. Rails was not designed as a framework; rather, it was extracted from a real project as a useful skeleton. It is "opinionated software" conceived and publicized as a reaction to the bloated frameworks in the Java world. Edge cases are pushed out into plugins, features generally have to be rejected several times before they make it into core, etc.

Of course they control Rails. Or are you telling me that I could this very minute submit some patch to Rails and announce that Rails 3.0 is out? I don't think so.

I don't deny that they might be different in orientation. But which one is a better bet, the one that tries to anticipate all your needs and make you happy (Spring), or the one that only cares for the needs of it's developers? Not saying either way - bloat might be a problem for some, but Spring is very modular, you can only use parts if you want to.

Spring earns more money if more people adapt it, so they try to make it as good as possible. What is the incentive for Rails, I don't know? Economically, their incentive would have to be to get their competition in trouble, to their own benefit? Perhaps they don't even use Rails internally ;-)

Actually Spring also grew out of frustration and personal need, it was a result of Rod Johnson's experiences as consultant, if I remember correctly.

Of course they control Rails. Or are you telling me that I could this very minute submit some patch to Rails and announce that Rails 3.0 is out? I don't think so.

37signals does not control Rails, these guys do: http://www.rubyonrails.org/core

This is a group of developers that you could become a part of if you were so inclined (the usual petty open source politics notwithstanding). This is markedly different from having a commercial vendor in control of the product.

I don't think they would just let anybody in. On the other hand, SpringSource probably wouldn't reject your free contributions to Spring either, if they are useful.

But which one is a better bet, the one that tries to anticipate all your needs and make you happy (Spring), or the one that only cares for the needs of it's developers?

I'm a developer with needs and desires that align with the goals of Rails, so I prefer Rails. In addition, I've got no interest in using Java for developing web applications, so that plays into it as well.

The beautiful truth is that no one is forcing anyone to use any of these projects. I am just happy to be making software at a time where there are so many frameworks and tools whose developers not only make their work available for free, but welcome my contributions if I'd like to put in the time.

Sure, I am not saying one should use the one or the other. I just think it is a major reason many people stick to Java. Essentially, using Ruby on Rails carries the risk that your project might eventually steer into territory outside of 37signals interests, and you get stuck (or have to invest into developing Rails). With java, usually all use cases are covered (except for closures).

Hmm, if you say so. :)

Well at least it feels like that for me. I'd like to use something else than Java, but so far I haven't found anything that doesn't seem too risky.

It probably also depends on the situation how much risk a person or company is willing to take.

You can always create OpenRails, just like OpenBSD guys did with OpenSSH.

You can do the same with Spring. For example, Groovy on Grails is also based on Spring.

Interesting, DHH runs his blog on SliceHost.

Does slicehost have that Amazon crap where on any given day, you might open the box and find that the cat is dead, or do you get your instance back even if something happens to it?

+1, hilarious cat metaphor

And, yes, the disk space and the IP, and apparently the percentage of CPU that you get, are all static. Very nice service, although I haven't automated my downtime monitoring so I can't speak to that.

No. Disk associated with your slice has persistent disk space. You also get a static IP.

I have a couple sites on Slicehost and I love it. The only thing I miss from shared hosting sites is the easy to use management console for setting up email and such. Other than that Slicehost is the way to go.

A pet feature I wish they had was exposing a way to download the actual Xen image your site is hosted within. Then you could be developing your production server sans internet, and rsync the resulting image.

I generally hate those consoles, as they make things work in unexpected ways. Recently, I spent a while tracking down a bug on a managed VPS with Plesk installed where mail sent by scripts on the server to the same domain (let's call it example.com) were going to local delivery at example.com instead of the MX entry of exchange.example.com (a separate server).

Many times, I want the email system to share its login database with some web app anyway.

What I would really love to see is affordable hosting like this but with the ability to do stuff like run a custom web server. I know this thread isn't really about hosting but has anyone seen something like this or is it even technically possible without going fully dedicated?

Read more on Slicehost -- its exactly that; you have full access to a virtualized machine, and can do pretty much anything.

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