New Xerox Logo
I find it rather humorous—and please excuse me while I get my biggest gripe out of the way—that this logo “animates” better and how it’s a key strength.
I agree, though, that the outer four letters look nice.
Archive for January 8, 2008
How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better
The feeling I get from the Rails community is that Rails is being pushed as some sort of high-end application system and that makes it ok to ignore the vast majority of user web environments. You simply cannot ignore the shared hosting users. In my opinion, the one thing the PHP people did that got them to where they are today is to embrace shared hosting and work hard to make their software work well within it. That means it has to be very lightweight (it may be too late for that in Rails already!), and it has to ‘plug in’ to a wide variety of operating environments with minimal fuss and hassle. Compatibility work like that is not glamorous, exciting, or fun, but it’s gotta be done.
Update (2008-01-10):
Sounds like a match made in heaven for someone like Dreamhost to get involved and help do the work to make Rails a great shared host experience. They might not have the man-power in-house today to make that happen, but I'm sure they could easily hire their way out of that.
It’s easy to say “The Rails team should make it easier to host”, but it’s sort of the nature of the beast, and I’ve never seen a good recommendation for specifically how they could do so.
Well, the Java community ignored shared hosting users. The Python community ignored shared hosting users. Basically every development community save Perl and PHP have stayed the hell away from shared hosting. Why? Because shared hosting is a ghetto.
The fact remains that both of those groups of web application developers, and I’d go so far as to say all web applications developers, want development environments that more or less ‘just work’. They want to focus on programming and leave the server administration alone. Rails does a great job at saving programmers on programming time (which is exactly why programmers like it), but many reports I’ve heard indicate that in many cases it trades that programming time for back-end server administration time instead.
