From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-09-10T20:00:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Another reason Rails doesn't suck

Phlip wrote:
> That page lampoons a very well-regarded and highly successful servlet engine 
> called Tomcat. (Written in a language whose name begins with J.)
> 

To be honest, Tomcat is even by some people who like said unnamed 
language considered a baroque beast. And Apache couldn't write 
documentation to save their lives. You're beating a dead horse in the 
wrong place here.

> Installing and configuring Tomcat is a total pain in the sphincter.
> 

I see your Tomcat, and I raise you by Oracle Express Edition on Ubuntu / 
Debian. Which won't even -start up- out of the box when installed from a 
.deb because their preinst and postinst scripts are buggy. Yay IT. 
Tomcat at least lets you go with defaults and blissfully ignore all 
config files that aren't your WEB-INF/web.xml when you just need a 
development setup.

> It's not a nuisance. The comparison to Tomcat illustrates just how powerful 
> this weak but flexible concept can get!
> 

It's the very opposite of flexible, actually, in that it strictly binds 
you to What They Know Better. Which works, and works well, until you 
find that one edge case where it doesn't, and you're screwed. It's 
cushy, but as it stands, it's actually a limitation

Where I work there's probably more people talking German than English, 
and a lot of development gets done in Slovak - complete with code 
identifiers (the documentation is easier to access if you don't have to 
map from slovak legalese to geekish all the time.) Rails table name 
conventions that can't be overriden short of jumping through some major 
hoops have the usefulness of a chocolate teapot in that environment.

David Vallner

PS: Java trolls. GO HOME!