Zed’s rant is long and boisterous; typically, I view such ranting with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, some of what he says in the post makes a little too much sense to shrug off as just malevolent lashing-out.

I jumped on the Rails bandwagon mid-last-year, and to me, it became a salvation of sorts. I experienced a programming environment that simultaneously gave me power to create and joy in development. Often those two things are toss ups, where one need either be limited or lulled into a near comatose state.

However, as I’ve worked with Rails more, I’ve realized that while it may have charted new frontier (being one of the first enterprise-level web frameworks for the common man), it is not the end all be all that many see it as.

Lately, I’ve begun development on a project at work that was slated to be developed in Django. This meant that I had to take a break from Rails and learn a new framework, a new language at that since I was not familiar with Python previously. Coming from Rails, I had a slight bias to Django from the start. For the most part, the two kids play nice, but every so often someone would post on the virtues of one of the two over the other. Django, in particular, seemed a bit of an upstart to me, with users and even the creators themselves often making grandiose claims of its superiority.

Initially, I found myself recoiling from many of Django’s “ways”. URLconfs made me want to kick someone’s ass. It was not until I got to creating templates in Django that it began to earn some respect in my eyes, but the clencher was the first time I tried to implement some AJAX.

Back when I was working on the TipDish project with the group from Startup Weekend Houston, I remember the hell I went through trying to implement AJAX in Rails. For some reason, I had a real mental with it. I knew how to do what I was trying to do outside of Rails, but I just couldn’t seem to get it working the Rails way inside Rails. I devoted two full nights of scouring the web and lurking in IRC before I found the answers I needed.

Django, I was sure, would be worse, knowing that documentation is more sparse for Django than Rails. I anticipated an even more hellish encounter with this framework, and at first, I seemed to receive it. I searched online for information to little avail. I found many references to Dojo and its imminent inclusion in Django. I looked at Dojo and cried. (As an aside in case I happen to the catch the notice of anyone on the Django development team: *please*, if you’re going to package a javascript framework, let it be anything but Dojo.)

Then, a miraculous light of entered my mind, complete with angels strumming on harps. I realized I was free. I could pick whatever javascript framework I wanted, or none at all. I could do it anyway I liked. I was not restricted into using built in functions or special code. And that’s when Django suddenly took on a whole new light for me. Here was something that did just what it was supposed to do: take care of all the cruft, so I don’t have to. After that, it get’s out of the way and let’s you do your thing.

Rails, for all it’s beauty, is controlling. It wants you to do things its way. Indeed, many times, I felt as if I was learning a new language just from the framework. Rails is training wheels. Even those that use it and swear by it seem to rewrite most of it as their apps grow, leaving very little Rails left to Rails. As Zed points out in his rant, the name itself admits to this; you’re supposed to stay on the “rails”.

Now, all this is not to say that I’m rejecting Rails now. I believe it will stay in my arsenal for quite some while, and I also believe it does have a lot of merit to itself. What I am saying is that the honeymoon period is over and I’m no longer star-struck in love with Rails. I’m also saying that the drastic shift of Zed Shaw against the Rails community (while probably not to be unexpected from Zed), should still be seen as an omen of sorts. There does seem to be a little too much “headiness” in the Rails community, where some people seem to feel they are just too damn smart to coexist with the rest of us. It’s not representative of the entire community, but it’s there, and it should be dealt with.

That said, check out Zed’s rant. If nothing else, it makes an entertaining read. And, if you haven’t already, give Django a look. You can never have too many tools in your arsenal as a web developer and its got some real power.

“Currently, sites and advertisers often use page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site. However, Yahoo Inc. and others are increasingly using a software trick called Ajax to improve the user experience. It allows sites to update data automatically and continually, without users needing to pull up new pages.” (emphasis mine)

A “software trick called Ajax”? Did the reporter in question even bother to research the story details? For those who have been locked in a closet for the past few years or have some other good reason for not knowing what AJAX is: AJAX is an acronym for Asychronous Javascript and XML. It is an application of Javascript, a client-side scripting language, not a language in an of itself. In fact, AJAX is, most simply, centered around a single Javascript class, XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest allows the retrieval of remote documents, principally XML documents, once the page has already been loaded. This means that content can be delivered on the fly, without a page refresh, which opens up a whole world of possibilities that were previously only pipe-dreams. ‘AJAX’ as a term, simply describes this process – i.e. the ‘asynchronous’ retrieval of external data that most normally falls in either the Javascript or XML categories.

What is most frightening to me is that anyone who hangs around on the web for more than 5 minutes should have at least heard the term before, and one would think that an Internet writer for the Associate Press would have even more familiarity with the concept. Even more disheartening is the absolute ease of finding out more about AJAX even if you knew nothing about it. Google ‘ajax’ and the first hit is a Wikipedia article that would at least provide enough understanding to realize that it’s not a ’software trick’.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. I have a penchant for doing that. Nevertheless, there’s really no excuse for such a glaring error, especially when it comes to what is supposed to be the World’s authoritative news source. </rant>