[dankohn1]

You are ignoring a decade of history in declaring Rails to be "dangerous for enterprise use". The reality is that Rails apps are used in thousands of enterprises around the world, as well as in "web-scale" businesses like Github, Airbnb, and Groupon.

However, Rails (and specifically ActiveRecord) has a very specific design philosophy (see http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm... ) which does not include support for stored procedures (because business logic belongs in the app, not the database).

Of course, there are ways to make stored procedures work with Rails (see https://github.com/leopoldodonnell/uses-stored-procedures ) but they are likely to end in tears, since you are working against the grain of the framework.

The basic argument for Rails is not about support for or against any specific underlying technology (if you can reach Facebook-scale on PHP, then you can make anything work), it is that using a mature and well-crafted framework maximizes developer productivity.

For most startups, as well as most enterprises, that is the critical resource.

[foobarian]

The "enterprise" I work at uses a dozen little RoR apps to put a quick and dirty UI on some DB tables so analysts/sales/support folks can interact with the data.

The main problem with Ruby in this kind of setting is that these internal tools are extremely hard to maintain because of backwards compatibility issues--which there are plenty due to lack of spec, organic language development etc. The effort to upgrade the Ruby version is much greater than doing incremental hacks to support some half-day feature, so the codebase stays pinned to the 2007 Ruby release, we can't use new gems, have to live with old bugs or missing features, etc. And with every new incremental change the project gets harder to upgrade.

The Java ecosystem has done a lot better in this regard. Scala is not very good either, we have had a couple Scala projects with version lock-in effect as well.

[marktangotango]

This is the longterm perspective thats rarely seen here, thank you.

[fat0wl]

hi dan,

i apologize, i must have been unclear because it seems that you (& some of the commenters below) are dissecting some of my statements quite literally whereas i put a lot of disclaimery type of statements to try to indicate that this is a combo of personal opinion / hazy memory (if the commenter below ever sees this he can also now receive my apology about mentioning datamapper as an ORM gaining traction, that must be a memory from years ago when i still did RoR). :D

I am aware that RoR has been successfully adopted many places, but i guess part of what i failed to explain here (that thankfully foobarian touches upon a bit) is that i believe that part of the power of "a spec" in a programming context is to maintain a solid core of functionality, that then also paves the way for expanded functionality in the future based on extensions of a similar style of syntax.

I know Ruby & Rails teams are not one and the same, I just have many memories of experiences in that community where library evolution is not incremental, does not expand functionality, deprecates as a rival lib rises in popularity.

In Java you see 2 things -- slow spec evolution & incremental expansion of features. It takes time (I know the fast-moving lang communities hate this) but I find it makes for much more robust codebases that survive upgrade processes with wayyyyyy less re-factoring/re-writing, and in type even some libraries that had their own syntax start to embrace/support the spec (Hibernate implements JPA now...).

So.... I suppose, yes, it is a personal matter perhaps. Some companies have used Rails successfully. But in freelance it has kindof bitten me (the overhead of dealing with security vulnerabilities / gem upgrades alone is astronomically more than I've dealt with in upgrading Java projects). I understand that a competent team can handle this & enterprises can pour money into making it work, but as a programmer who often works alone & hates forced unplanned maintenance, it is a tough pill to swallow.

Also, maybe it is because I am dealing with a lot of enterprise/legacy code at times. Sure, maybe business logic shouldn't go in the database. But if someone supplies me a library of highly complex Oracle functions & tells me i need to wrap these into services ASAP, am I really going to begin an immediate re-write? I would prefer that my framework is just able to wrap these functions until a re-write can be scheduled (if the codebase isn't retired before then...). Also in the enterprise community I don't find as much of a desire to have ALL logic in the app layer... often devs feel that as long as a stored procedure / view / whatever returns a meaningful coherent entity that is useful in the business logic layer, they don't really care where/how the query was aggregated.

I also understand anything can be made to scale & work for an enterprise... but it takes enterprise-level support!! I am more a champion of the rogue programmer trying to build an enterprise with a few lines of code a day. ;)

Best, john