On Nov 30, 2011, at 10:50 AM, Chris McCann wrote: > An interesting post about where Rails fits in with the current web- > enabled application landscape. > > http://broadcastingadam.com/2011/11/moving_on_from_rails > > Thoughts?
Makes sense to me. IMO, he's not really describing anything new. It's just that his world has gotten bigger. Where his world was previously self-contained within a Rails app before, he now sees that maybe that's no longer the case. I think many people saw rails as the "app" in the same way people see a desktop app as the app. The underlying language, OS/app frameworks, and UI frameworks are bundled together. Rails did that (as did many others web frameworks before it). If you needed to create a small web app for a small business, Rails could handle it all. That's what a lot of people need and do, so Rails is great for that. However, if you needed to create an entire suite of apps to drive the internal management of a large R&D or sales operation, you might not want the entire thing encapsulated in Rails. You'd want to separate out the core business logic from the access to that logic. You may want to run the core on a set of servers completely separated from the terminals. You'd count on those kinds of servers and generic tools to be around for a long time. But you'd expect to adapt to the changing winds of user access. Maybe you'd write a thin client as Windows, Linux, and Mac desktop apps. Or browser apps. Or now iOS/android apps. User access has to stay flexible because it changes faster than your core needs for logic/control/data storage. They tend to stay pretty consistent over time. That type of core logic / access separation has existed for a very long time. The difference of when you'd need to use that layering is if you expect your core app to be useful for many years. I think he's just recognizing this separation of time scales for his own realm. And I think he's saying that web apps in general are changing because the user access landscape has been changing. I don't think that's new. People went through the same thought process when user access shifted from terminals to desktop apps to the browser. Now its just from a big screen browser to many types of browsers. Will it change more quickly in the future? Possibly. So, maybe before you'd think about a timescale of 10 years where today maybe you have to think about 3-5 years? Meaning, if you expect a Rails app to be useful for more than a few years, you should separate the core logic out so you can adapt more quickly to the new fangled access devices and protocols? Could be. Adaptability is key to survival. Anyway, I think it is a valid and welcome insight for people to noodle on, but it's not a brand new paradigm shift. It's an additional shift, similar to shifts which have occurred before. Which means we can learn from those who have faced it before. -- gw -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
