Moving towards Ruby on Rails from ASP.NET

Question

I am ASP.NET developer from last 5 years and still loving it. There are lots of good voices in air about Ruby on Rails. I want to ask to community, Is there any worth trying to

Answer 1

I'd take a gander as ASP.NET MVC. This way you can stick with the .NET Framework yet still get some of the things you probably want out of RoR.

ASP.NET MVC is very lightweight and easy to scale with some of the APIs it provides (SQL storage for sessions or even Microsoft Velocity).

ASP.NET MVC has lots of support from the community and thus has lots of documentation and feedback from the community and Microsoft itself.

Lots. Check out http://www.codeplex.com/ASPNET for more information.

Well, ASP.NET MVC is bin-deployable. So as long as your host supports ASP.NET 3.5 there's nothing else you need. They don't need to have ASP.NET MVC installed in any sort of way. So if you wanted to, you could easily use a shared host.

Deployment is very easy with ASP.NET MVC and with the changes coming to Visual Studio 2010 for easier deployment of web sites via "Packages." I currently maintain 2 ASP.NET MVC sites and find it with bin-deployment to be just the same as a regular ASP.NET WebForms site.

Answer 2

Well I dont know anything about the Scalability part, but personaly i started learning Ruby On Rails from ASP.NET a while ago. I really had a hard time finding some good documentation - the class documentation on Rails site was really poor in my eyes, and I had a simple question about what arguments you could put into an actionlink. But maybe it was just me who never found the right place. But personally i think that the ASP.NET documentation is better than rails - at least buy a book, i think thats a good way to go.

Number 3. Im pritty sure that there is very good Community Support for rails you just have to find the right forum or other media that suites your liking - maybe this what was I did wrong.

Number 4. There is alot of hosting solutions for Rails, but not as much as ASP.NET or PHP. I think you have to research this your self, and find out, if there is anything that suites your likeing.

Number 5. Ruby should be very easy to deploy, it has a notion of a development, test and production database. It uses migrations, so updates in the database schema is seamless - thats very cool. It is scripting, so it should be a matter of xcopy from the development computer to the production server.

The reason you should choose Ruby on Rails is if you like the MVC pattern. The MVC pattern is genius, and ruby is a great language when you learn it. Maybe take a dive into the ASP.NET MVC, and see what its like - then maybe move to Rails. Then you only have to learn a new language, and not a new arhitecture, framework and language at the same time.

Remmember this is from a ASP.NET Developer who sniffed to Rails, but gave up, doe to the lack of ability to find really good documentation, and there was always some strange errors, from the editor or Rails - but thats properbly a newbie thing :)

But if you have time, by all means learn it. Some developers say that we should learn one new language per year, and Ruby is a great candidate for that.

Answer 3

1) Scalability

Rails is just as scalable as any other web-application stack. The only difference is that your single server might get overloaded, and require splitting to 2 servers sooner than it would in .NET due to the slower performance of the ruby runtime. In practice this is not a problem.

2) Documentation

Microsoft do provide better documentation for the core libraries than Ruby or Rails, but the ruby/rails ones are still on the whole very good. I'd consider ruby/rails to be the winner here for the simple fact that you can always view the source for everything. No amount of documentation is a substitute for being able to actually see what's happening.

3) Community Support

I've been nothing but impressed by the community support around rails. I don't know what else to say there.

4) Hosting Solutions

Since phusion passenger got released, It seems to be easier these days to find rails hosting than it is to find ASP.net hosting. This is only going to sway more towards rails as time goes by for the simple fact that hosting companies do not have to pay royalties towards microsoft to deploy rails on linux servers.

5) Deployment ETC.

Capistrano (the most common deployment solution for rails) beats everything else hands down.

Answer 4

I'm now in your shoes, because I'm learning RoR after commercially developing in .NET for 5 years. Here is my two cents:

1. Scalability: I believe that rails can scale quite well, there are numerous options available, such as mongrel clusters on linux.
2. This one is a bit worse than on .NET. But the community is very good and you'll never find yourself searching for a good way to go.
3. See above (it is excellent)
4. Hosting is not a problem: numerous hosting options available.
5. I find transition from development to test and then to production better thought of in Ror than in ASP.NET.

Answer 5

I fully agree with Chad's post.

I was half way through development of an app in rails and now i've done a complete 360 and have reconsidered after delving deep into ASP.NET MVC for my day job commitments.

I am now changing courses and looking into ASP.NET MVC for all my personal projects, I think both are honestly remarkably comparable now as I think MS has had a good hard look at Ruby on Rails' feature set and ensured they could match features very closely. After all, if you couple a project with LINQ 2 SQL / EF, ASP.NET MVC and potentially Dynamic Data (if you need that sort of thing), I really can't think of any compelling reasons to choose Rails over .NET, however I CAN choose reasons to select .NET over rails - after all hands down the rich debugging experience with VS.NET, rich intellisense and watcher/quickwatch support plus the ASP.NET MVC framework supports Html Action Helpers, Model Binders, support and encouragement for unit testing, and now with the inclusion of JQuery and JSON results, you're virtually unstoppable.

I suppose besides obviously hosting/licensing costs, Ruby language preference and other personal preferences such as it being open source etc, It's really your choice.