« Impressions from JAOO 2008 (3) | Main | The future of programming languages »
Michael Koziarski (Rails core team) interview
By vahagn | October 7, 2008
Michael Koziarski is one of the contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework and he visited JAOO with a talk about Rails performance. I interviewed him about the upcoming Rails release, the future of the framework, and about that special “something” that gives Rails its edge.
1) What is the single most important improvement planned for Rails?
We don’t tend to have long-term plans for major improvements, it’s up to our contributors what gets included in any given release.
However there’s some pretty interesting stuff lined up for our 2.2 release which is due out soon. We have some new infrastructure available for building performance tests and benchmarks for your applications. This should make it as simple as possible to track down performance problems in your applications.
We’ve also added more functionality that makes it really easy to embrace HTTP to improve your application’s performance. Things like making deep-etags incredibly simple. This makes your application play really nicely with your user’s browser cache and can make a huge difference in responsiveness.
Finally we’ve put a lot of work into making sure that the 2.2 release behave more nicely in threaded environments. This should allow for significantly reduced memory in JRuby deployments, and can give some minor performance improvements in MRI applications in some simple scenarios. This change will mean that JRuby has a substantial advantage for some applications. If you haven’t evaluated JRuby yet, you should do it now.
2) At RailsConf 2007, DHH said Rails could go three ways: 1) Someone copies it; 2) The Rails paradigms becomes mainstream among the broad slate of web frameworks; 3) A new, radical innovation within web frameworks comes along that makes Rails a paradigm of yesteryear. Based on the (short) time elapsed since the time of that statement, which one of these trends do you see materializing?
We’ve had copiers and pretenders since the very early days, I expect we’ll continue to see them going forward. These are often people cloning our functionality in alternative programming languages, but we’ve always had ruby-copiers too.
Sometimes I find it kinda sad that all that effort is put into duplicating our functionality. Imagine what awesome stuff could be achieved with everyone pushing in the same direction! But at the same time I can understand the motivation that people have to scratch their own itch.
Similarly lots of the other mainstream web frameworks have started picking up some of our good ideas. The java frameworks have started thinking about convention-over-configuration which I think is fantastic. Also our innovations with REST conventions have been picked up by a lot of other players, which I think should benefit everyone.
3) The success of Rails is not just due to the fact that it makes creating web applications easy and quick; it is also a cultural phenomenon within the developer community because it is 1) opinionated software that stresses best practices 2) has a strong focus on design and aesthetics, including code and beyond.
Would you agree with the above?
I put most of our success down to our choice to offer a low-resistance path to best practices, but at the same time allowing people to paint outside the lines if they really want to. I think there’s a common bug in software developers that seems to equate *having* to make a choice with *being able* to make a choice.
Just because rails ships with prototype doesn’t mean you have to use it, but some people seem to think it’s impossible to do JQuery with rails. The alternative to this would be to ship with nothing and make you decide every time you start a project. To some people this default-choice approach is being inflexible, but I think it’s a key part of our success.
Thank you!
October 19th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
[...] upon real-world use. The JRuby story continues to get stronger every day, with things like thread-safety in the upcoming Rails 2.2 release adding fuel to the [...]