Why “Rails” is the perfect metaphor
I’ve seen various posts that describe what it means to be “on rails” but none that actually address actual physics of it, and why it’s such a perfect metaphor for what Ruby on Rails is.
Why do trains stay on their tracks? Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not the flanges. If it were the flanges, there’d be lots of wear and noise by passing trains. Instead, it’s because treads of the wheels are tapered, and this taper causes the wheel pair to naturally “hunt” for the center of the rails. Richard Feyman explains it quite well on YouTube. Or for even more detail, read about rail adhesion on Wikipedia.
I like to think of the Ruby on Rails framework as the software equivalent of the taper. The conventions that are built into RoR continually drive us back towards making a maintainable application, with good separation of model, view, and controller, test driven development and rich testing frameworks, and the rich ecosystem of gems to avoid reinventing the wheel (pun intended) in common features of applications. Add in some DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), and the bevels increase, and the result is like having the two rails turn into a V-groove that your application just rolls smoothly down.
I’ll go even further (and abuse the metaphor) to compare other platforms to the rails. Java is like a railroad without any taper, and it depends on the flanges to stay on track. Java’s flanges include the static typing and the multitude of frameworks that try and help make a better flange (Spring, Struts, Hibernate, J2EE, etc). And oh, does it make a lot of grinding noises!
But thank goodness for the open source community creating all those flanges faster than the Java train can derail, because the .NET world is like a a railroad with the bevels getting wider toward the outside, which is a terribly unstable configuration. (I wish I could find the video I have such a vivid memory seeing as a child (PBS?) showing the comparison of the conical configurations). Sure, really good engineers can create a workable train route, but it’s just too easy for an inexperienced developer to create a train wreck from all the wizards.
RoR is the first framework in my 18+ years of server-side web development that makes me regret all the flanges I had to make in the other frameworks. Thank goodness for those tapers!
All Aboard!
I’d actually compare Java to a locomotive without any the rails, with the open source community frantically laying track, each leading in a different direction.
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