Odeley

To learn and to review Rails I started a project some time ago.
At the moment I really don’t know if this was a good decision. Don’t get me wrong -I really appreciate Rails and the whole development was fun. It’s amazing what you can do with some lines of code and how smart the whole framework is built.

Actually, I would really say Rails, considered as it is, is a quite mature platform - especially speaking about Rails2.0. But coming form rock-solid Java development, in comparison Rails development with all it’s dependencies is negligent immature.

Huh, what am I talking about:
I am talking about Rails and their dependencies, more exact: gems and plugins you want to use ’cause they seem to be well done and seem to save you a lot of work.
But while my development goes on the opposite seems to be true: Every one of the used plugins I had to rewrite or bugfix after searching the Internet for other fellow sufferers who had the same problem.

See my prior post about ferret!

And now, beside others I hate working with the award-winning attachment_ fu plugin. It would be great w/o having its dependencies.

1. After updating Rails and other gems and ImageMagick just to be work on the actual versions, thumbnailing was not working anymore. The reason I have installed a ImageMagick version that lacked jpeg support. Ok! I was my fault! But that attachment_fu absorbs all exceptions made me go grazy. You won’t see this in Java.
2. As RMagick is known to cause memory leaks I switched to mini_magick. And soon I had the next big problem. Should I try out ImageScience now and wait for the next bugs to fix?

And that is my problem with Rails. I have to fix well-known bugs in an immature environment and loose so much time. Perhaps staying on the Java platform would take a longer development time but I can rely on 3rd party libs.