Ruby-on-rails – Rails vs Ruby CGI

cgirubyruby-on-rails

I have a boss who is convinced learning Rails is too steep a learning curve and not cost effective from a labor standpoint when straight Ruby running as a CGI app on Apache is available. He is proposing, for our rewrite, that we use straight Ruby w/ no framework rather than Rails (or Merb, Sinatra, etc.) I believe in my heart that this is a bad idea but I'm having trouble putting my case into words. Some ideas I've come up with so far:

Rails promotes better code reuse and better separation of concerns via MVC
A shop running rails will look more attractive to the qualified job seeker, since Rails looks better on his/her resume, is more fun to work with, etc.
(I may be wrong on this one) Rails will have better performance on Passenger because Passenger automatically pools connections to the database where as a handrolled CGI app would have to manage that itself or not at all resulting in worse performance.
Rails is a proven technology, at least certainly more than a handrolled CGI framework

Are there any reasons I'm missing or wrong about? Are there valid tradeoffs I'm not aware of?

Best Solution

There are occasionally good reasons for a company to roll their own framework instead of using a standard Rack-compliant framework. But "Rails has too steep a learning curve" is not one of them.

Doing it brute-force is actually more complex, rather than less. If your boss is really worried about learning curve, he should use the standard framework that has documentation and articles and screencasts and entire hosting companies dedicated to it.

Besides, Rails is dead easy to develop for. I've taught one-day workshops on Rails, and even people who have never programmed before have a working, deployed app by the end of the day. Experienced developers have an even easier time of it.

If your boss doesn't understand Rails, and rather than figure it out, he's giving you this line about Ruby over CGI...be careful. Technology left him behind 15 years ago, and he's no longer qualified to make technical decisions.

He should be moved into marketing without delay.

Related Solutions

Ruby – How to call shell commands from Ruby

This explanation is based on a commented Ruby script from a friend of mine. If you want to improve the script, feel free to update it at the link.

First, note that when Ruby calls out to a shell, it typically calls /bin/sh, not Bash. Some Bash syntax is not supported by /bin/sh on all systems.

Here are ways to execute a shell script:

cmd = "echo 'hi'" # Sample string that can be used

Kernel#` , commonly called backticks – `cmd`

This is like many other languages, including Bash, PHP, and Perl.

Returns the result (i.e. standard output) of the shell command.

Docs: http://ruby-doc.org/core/Kernel.html#method-i-60
```
value = `echo 'hi'`
value = `#{cmd}`
```
Built-in syntax, %x( cmd )

Following the x character is a delimiter, which can be any character. If the delimiter is one of the characters (, [, {, or <, the literal consists of the characters up to the matching closing delimiter, taking account of nested delimiter pairs. For all other delimiters, the literal comprises the characters up to the next occurrence of the delimiter character. String interpolation #{ ... } is allowed.

Returns the result (i.e. standard output) of the shell command, just like the backticks.

Docs: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/syntax/literals_rdoc.html#label-Percent+Strings
```
value = %x( echo 'hi' )
value = %x[ #{cmd} ]
```
Kernel#system

Executes the given command in a subshell.

Returns true if the command was found and run successfully, false otherwise.

Docs: http://ruby-doc.org/core/Kernel.html#method-i-system
```
wasGood = system( "echo 'hi'" )
wasGood = system( cmd )
```
Kernel#exec

Replaces the current process by running the given external command.

Returns none, the current process is replaced and never continues.

Docs: http://ruby-doc.org/core/Kernel.html#method-i-exec
```
exec( "echo 'hi'" )
exec( cmd ) # Note: this will never be reached because of the line above
```

Here's some extra advice: $?, which is the same as $CHILD_STATUS, accesses the status of the last system executed command if you use the backticks, system() or %x{}. You can then access the exitstatus and pid properties:

$?.exitstatus

For more reading see:

Ruby-on-rails – How to “pretty” format JSON output in Ruby on Rails

Use the pretty_generate() function, built into later versions of JSON. For example:

require 'json'
my_object = { :array => [1, 2, 3, { :sample => "hash"} ], :foo => "bar" }
puts JSON.pretty_generate(my_object)

Which gets you:

{
  "array": [
    1,
    2,
    3,
    {
      "sample": "hash"
    }
  ],
  "foo": "bar"
}

Best Solution

Related Solutions

Ruby – How to call shell commands from Ruby

Ruby-on-rails – How to “pretty” format JSON output in Ruby on Rails

Related Question