Simple Complexity
Rails is simple– or complex– depending on how you look at it. There’s a lot of complexity under the covers that makes creating applications simple. This simplicity can be a bit misleading; surely something everyone says is easy to use can’t solve complex problems or cater to rich domains, right?
While it’s true that Rails can’t simplify the problems and concerns that exist in a rich domain, it can make them easier to deal with. The fact you have a good, sturdy walking stick doesn’t make the mountain any shorter, it just makes it less exhausting.
Although you can still find plenty of naysayers out there complaining that Rails is unsuitable for the enterprise, and that anything based on a “scripting” language is just a hacked-together solution (thank you, very much), those of us who are writing huge web applications know better.
Take a look at the curious imaeg to the right… what is it? A drapery that I have, for some crazy reason, deemed interesting enough to dress up with a drop shadow and post?
No, it’s a very small detail of my application’s model diagram, showing models (ovals) and associations (lines). By “small” I mean– at most– 1/50th. Wer’re talking over 250 models with over 1,100 separate associations. And I just shiver at the thought of doing this in PHP, CF, JSP, or ASP (okay, vomit in the case of ASP).
IThis ain’t no /t(oa)d\1\slist/, folks.
