At the risk of giving offense, I have to say some of your comments seem to be written in ignorance of Rails. This whole bit is surprising to me:
"Built in Rails (Total additional developer time to add these features: 400 hours)
(1) Damn, back to the drawing board, we need 100 more hours of dev time to develop a custom component ...
(2) Damn, back to the drawing board, we need 250 more hours of dev time to build a calendar and ensure we get the layout correct...
(3) Developer has to add a form element to take that event type...
Built in Drupal (Total additional developer time to add these features: 0 hours)"
The thing about a programming language that allows for meta-programming is how easy it makes it to stitch together the code you need from components. Ruby is very good in this regard, and also any Lisp would be good in this regard, and my new favorite is Clojure, which is exceedingly excellent in this regard.
I had worked with Rails in 2006, then taken a break from it, then came back to it. I just worked on a very big Rails project in 2011. One thing that surprised me was how little code I had to write. All of the functionality that we needed was in a gem, and we only had to write a few lines of code to customize the operation of each gem. Need to integrate events with a map? There is a gem for that. Need to add slugs to all articles and have them become the id that appears in the URL? There is for a gem for that. I would write maybe 10 or 20 lines of code for each gem, telling it how to interact with our application.
To be productive at Rails, you have to know what gems are out there. You need to keep up with the gems, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Rails. There is a gem for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which gems are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Rails, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the gem that you should be using.
Your comments comparing Rails and Drupal surprises me. I feel like you are writing without realizing how Rails development is done.
> Your comments comparing Rails and Drupal surprises me. I feel like you are writing without realizing how Rails development is done.
First, no offense taken.
Next, I do have a fair amount of experience developing in Rails (it's my go-to hobby framework and I MUCH prefer developing in it to Drupal as I thought I imparted in my original comment) and yes, there are gems that get you most of the way there with some of the tasks I described, but our site builders (read: non-developers) are unfamiliar with the command line, could not generally install gems without intervention from developers and, if necessary, could not extend them without developer intervention. That is what I'm trying to describe.
With Drupal, people who interact only with a web browser can install rich components from a library of modules developed by others with integration with the Content Types (basically the equivalent of Rails Models in Drupal) with zero development.
Looking back at my original comment, arguably my time estimates for development were exaggerated to some extent and could be shortened with the use of gems, but the fact remains there is, at current, no way for users, through only a web browser, to enable that kind of rich functionality in Rails. That was the point I was trying to get across.
You don't have to write much code but you still have to write code. This makes it a non-starter for a particular class of user.
"To be productive at Rails, you have to know what gems are out there. You need to keep up with the gems, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Rails. There is a gem for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which gems are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Rails, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the gem that you should be using."
This made me smile:
:%s/Rails/Drupal/g
:%s/gem/module/g
"To be productive at Drupal, you have to know what modules are out there. You need to keep up with the modules, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Drupal. There is a module for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which modules are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Drupal, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the module that you should be using."
> If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom
> code in Rails, then either you are truly tackling a
> novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before,
> or you are simply unaware of the gem that you should
> be using.
Sounds like Perl - or any other mature language, though I have never seen one with that many libraries for anything I could think about.
The language that has the libraries I need is always the one I end up using.
"Built in Rails (Total additional developer time to add these features: 400 hours)
(1) Damn, back to the drawing board, we need 100 more hours of dev time to develop a custom component ...
(2) Damn, back to the drawing board, we need 250 more hours of dev time to build a calendar and ensure we get the layout correct...
(3) Developer has to add a form element to take that event type...
Built in Drupal (Total additional developer time to add these features: 0 hours)"
The thing about a programming language that allows for meta-programming is how easy it makes it to stitch together the code you need from components. Ruby is very good in this regard, and also any Lisp would be good in this regard, and my new favorite is Clojure, which is exceedingly excellent in this regard.
I had worked with Rails in 2006, then taken a break from it, then came back to it. I just worked on a very big Rails project in 2011. One thing that surprised me was how little code I had to write. All of the functionality that we needed was in a gem, and we only had to write a few lines of code to customize the operation of each gem. Need to integrate events with a map? There is a gem for that. Need to add slugs to all articles and have them become the id that appears in the URL? There is for a gem for that. I would write maybe 10 or 20 lines of code for each gem, telling it how to interact with our application.
To be productive at Rails, you have to know what gems are out there. You need to keep up with the gems, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Rails. There is a gem for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which gems are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Rails, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the gem that you should be using.
Your comments comparing Rails and Drupal surprises me. I feel like you are writing without realizing how Rails development is done.