I tried Ruby back in I think 2008 and had just an absolute beast
of a time getting it running on the servers. PHP, by contrast,
almost just worked.
RoR is a lot better now than it was at that point, though I'm
still not impressed with it. I do some work stuff with it and
often hit pretty random seeming problems:
1) versions don't match. Stuff like rvm and bundler can mitigate
this, but they don't help searching the web. Find a technique and
try it... but it requires Rails 2.17 and the app depends in 2.15
or something stupid like that. I guess you can't blame them for
adding new features, but I do wish the documentation for old
versions was always easy to get to and always easily labeled so
it would be obvious. (D could do this too!)
2) SSL/TLS just seems to randomly fail in applications and the
tools like gem and bundle. Even updating the certificates on the
system didn't help most recently, I also had to set an
environment variable, which seems just strange.
3) Setting up the default WEBrick isn't too bad, but making it
work on a production system (like apache passenger) has been
giving us trouble. Got it working for the most part pretty fast,
but then adding more stuff became a painful config nightmare.
This might be the application (based on Rails 2 btw) more than
the platform in general, but it still irked me.
4) It is abysmally slow, every little thing takes forever. DB
changes, slow. Asset recompiles: slow. Tests: slow. Restarting
the server: slow. The app itself: slow. I'm told Ruby on the JVM
is faster though :)
My main problems with ruby on rails though are bad decisions and
just underwhelming aspect of actually using it. Everyone sells it
as being the best thing ever and so fast to develop against but
I've seen better like everything. Maybe it was cool in 2005 (if
you could actually get it running then...), but not so much
anymore.
