Not Just The Defaults
Monday, April 27th, 2009 | Nick Bugajski
Now that Rails 2.3 is out, I am looking forward to the Rails 3 changes, some of which are already starting to land on the development branch.
The biggest change coming is the work to decouple the various components from each other. This should allow, without great pains, swapping out of the various components that make up rails. Don’t like Prototype? Swap in jQuery. ActiveRecord causing too much pain? Try out Data Mapper.
My enthusiasm here is not necessarily that I need to change from these defaults, but more that I often find myself wanting to experiment with alternatives. Having to switch to an entirely new web application framework just to try out a new ORM library is not an effective use of my time. Most of my work on rails applications is constrained severely by time and I just do not have enough of it to justify spending many hours trying to get productive in a new framework just to see if one part of it has better characteristics for my needs.
I still like my framework opinionated, but if I can get that and have the ability to choose alternatives to the defaults, well count me in.
1 Comment to Not Just The Defaults
Excellent observation — ORM tools, security frameworks, and RIA frameworks are particularly tricky to learn. After wrestling one to submission (i.e., useful in a project), I prefer to reapply that knowledge to the next project. Rails needs this modularity to propel it to enterprise IT class applications development, and to preserve sanity.
May 1, 2009