Rails - ghetto blasted?

Ever since Zed Shaw published his iconic post, "Rails is a ghetto", it's become super-hip to hate Ruby on Rails, along with iPods, Prius', and anything else that reeks of hipster fad-ism. Thanks to reddit (a site I rarely read due to the oversaturation of Ron Paul stories and cynical ranting), I stumbled across this rant about MagLev.

To be fair, I hadn't heard of MagLev before this article, and I haven't seen the presentation, since I wasn't at RailsConf (maybe next year). I was hoping for a quick rundown of what MagLev was, and perhaps some of the flaws this particular author saw in it.

He mentioned a few of the features of MagLev in passing: a shared memory cache, an OODB... well, that's it. No real description of the project.

Basically, I can sum up his entire rant in one sentence: "A 60x speedup over rails? Yeah, right." You could twitter that. Instead, a long-winded rant made its way so far up reddit that it appeared on popurls.

Honestly, I'm tired of reading speculation, guessing, and half-assed reasoning as to why Rails and any of its derived technology sucks. Will every Rails app that scales have the same kinds of issues as Twitter? I doubt it. I'm willing to bet there are certain applications where Rails is an ideal framework for building webapps, and quite a few situations where Rails is the wrong way to go.

What I would like to read, from the rails-hating community (which is now a popular clique in its own right), is an informative post detailing what problems Rails has that other platforms do not. Specific comparisons to other MVC frameworks like Django or Cake would be great - even other backends like Grails or some Java-based thingy would be cool, too. Also, delving into the C basis of Ruby and Rails for some actual snippets that seem flawed would be very informative.

For now, I'm going to go ahead and keep using Rails until it no longer seems like a great platform for the projects I'm working on.

Keeping on Task with Tracks

So, I finally found it: my dream todo list manager. Tracks is a Ruby on Rails implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done task management methodology. Though not sung in hymns like it was a year or two ago, GTD is still a highly practical way of organizing upcoming tasks by next actions.

There are a couple reasons to love Tracks. First off, it's open source, so you can set it up on your own server. I don't have to worry about the company's revenue model and sustainability factor when I set it up - as long as I have web space, it's there. Second, it has a very useful home page, with links to all your current next actions, sorted by context, and a handy-dandy AJAX action form. Quick and simple addition and completion of items make it a breeze to keep your system up to date.

Finally, the one feature I've wanted forever in a todo list app - it archives completed items and puts them out of the way. This way, even if my todo list isn't shrinking, I can tell I am actually accomplishing things. And I can look back and see when and how I was accomplishing things - very handy when I consider changes like cutting caffeine or exercising more.

If you've set up a RoR application before, Tracks is a pretty quick install, but I will warn folks that Ruby applications are more complicated to setup than simple PHP stuff. Once I got mine setup on Dreamhost, however, I've been tasking away for three weeks now. And I don't see myself turning back any time soon.

Now if only it would sync to my palm or ical...