RailsConf keynote videos 3
A couple of the keynotes from RailsConf are available for viewing.
I highly recommend watching the entirety of Martin Fowler’s talk, in which he explains his views on Rails from a design perspective. I’ve owned several of Martin’s books over the years, and always wondered what he sounded like :-) His talk about Ruby, Rails, and object oriented design in this keynote was really energizing for me.
I had been disheartened earlier in the day by Dave Thomas’s talk (no offense, Dave!) Dave’s a great guy and has been great to the Ruby community. And although I agreed with some of what Dave said, I couldn’t have disagreed more with his view on changing Rails to play better in legacy environments. I sure was relieved to hear DHH’s talk the following night. But I still recommend that you view his keynote, too: see what you think and let us know your thoughts.
What did you disagree with about Dave's advocating more legacy database support? Would that be a bad thing somehow?
Well, the only thing I can say to validate Dave's argument for multiple keys and so fourth, is it would allow Rails to expand to a broader set of developers.
For me personally, I'll probably never need to work on a legacy project with Rails, as I'd more than likely not take a project with natural keys in some crazy nebulous legacy database.
However, for Rails to stay around for the long term, we need a decent set of developers. Don't get me wrong -- Rails already has a ton of great minds using it, but the more people that realize the productivity gains of using Rails, and programming in Ruby -- the better. That means more patches, more plugins, and what I think Rails is lacking the most in -- more documentation, and blog posts.
Just my $0.02.
Ryan, the main things I disagreed with were:
Support for legacy databases in order to play nice with the mainstream. He had some good points, like perhaps the need to support distributed transactions, etc. but the overall spirit to compromise on Rails' focus in order to bring more Java folks into the fold hit a sore spot with me. I hated ASP.NET partly because in trying to be all things to all people, it wasn't very good at anything. I don't want Rails to fall down that slippery slope.
Dave wants fancier scaffolding for a more Web 2.0-like "out of the box experience". I think that's dangerous. As it is, many developers depend on the scaffolding as a crutch, and as Amy Hoy presented at the conference, to get better at Rails you need to throw that crutch away and learn it for yourself. I'm not against ajax views at all, of course! I'm just saying, putting a fancy ajax front end out of the box is going to make things harder for some developers, not easier. I did agree with Dave in his plea more declarative stuff in the views, so we can write less rhtml.
Dave observed that database contraints and ActiveRecord declarations (has_many, belongs_to, etc.) are duplicating knowledge, which many of us agree with. But he wants Rails to automatically detect the foreign key relationships so we don't have to write belongs_to, etc. I think that's backwards. That puts the power back into the hands of the dba, not the application developer. I want my Ruby code to be all I need to look at, and magically let the database build foreign key columns if needed. Until such magic arrives, I need to explicitly tell my database what columns it needs to represent the object relationships I have in my application. But the fix for that is not to take intelligence out of the application as an apparent workaround.
Ryan, am I making sense? I'd like to know what your thoughts were on Dave's talk, too, especially if you think I may have misinterpreted something he said.