One of my first projects as a Ruby/Rails programmer is simply getting static pages served on Heroku. That's it. Nothing fancy. I know that some would argue that I should be coming up with an "application," and I'm getting there. A friend had an immediate need to roll his static page over to Rails as he began to plan for more functionality, and I was happy to help to get some practice.
A few things pop into my head here. I have only been programming in Ruby/Rails for two weeks now, and that has been at night after the day job. I haven't even been fully invested in it each and every night, and yet I still feel like I'm growing in proficiency fairly quickly. Rails has its own set of frustrations - but 90% of the time, I feel like this is just how things should be DONE.
However....
Rails is an opinionated framework. It has a prescribed way of doing things, and it doesn't quite care if you don't want to do things that way. I still have no idea how I would directly deal with an HTTP request; I let Rails do that for me. I thought that these opinions would only deal with how my application is constructed - but I am now learning that Rails itself is designed to keep away from what's going on under the hood.
It is well-documented that Rails follows a Model-View-Controller pattern. I am accustomed to a (T)emplate being in there somewhere, coming from a Python environment. I said to myself "oh, Views are like Templates, even though they're a bit more complex." And temporarily, all was good. Then I started trying to serve static pages built out of Bootstrap. And - perhaps most importantly - I tried serving static pages using code that my collaborator had been fiddling with. He had been working on getting Devise up and running, and had set a login/logout button up in his experimentation.
Caring little for my collaborator's code, I blew away his pre-constructed views. (I'm working on my own Git branch as we're getting things up and running) I dutifully created .erb files in place, and redirected my controllers appropriately. I am serving static files! But wait... that login/logout button is still showing up. How is that possible? I knew it wasn't in the Bootstrap HTML I was creating, and I knew that all of the previous views were gone.
When working with Django OR webapp2, I would solve this problem by opening up the template and the view that called it. Eventually, my code itself would reveal that I had called some secondary template file in a prior iteration of the code, and that I need to delete that line. I cracked open my controller and my .erb file, and got nothing. There is nothing in the code that told me where that login/logout button is.
Turns out, Rails has a layouts folder. The login/logout button was placed into a layout.
Rails is not transparent about what it is doing. There is no indication in code that I created that alluded to this layouts folder. rails server is calling some Ruby method to look in the layout folder first, then it stitches in my views. What happens if I install some gem that intercepts that layout/view method and injects its own code because the author thought that would be a good idea? How I would I debug this?
Rails makes me nervous because I suspect I'll have to debug any application in a convoluted manner. I can't immediately tell if my Ruby code is weird, if I have a bad gem, or if I don't know enough about Rails' methods. I'm not sure how I'll solve problems. So, Rubyists, I pose yet another question to you: how do you debug your applications as they grow in complexity? Is Rails simpler than I suspect, and so I will learn its ins and outs quickly? Or is this gem interdependency and aggressive abstraction symptomatic of a framework that consists of bolted-on parts?
The cost of getting up and running with rails verses node in this case but you can subsitute node with Sinatra or Flask.