There has been a minor storm brewing for a while now within the Rails community and one which I have predicted and written about (at length) last year.

It began with a disgruntled rant from Zed Shaw who was responsible for the Mongerel engine for rails. Zed seems to be disheartened with the Rails development community on the whole and whilst his rant is a little bit immature in places, it is worth a read as with every argument there is elements of truth and elements of fantasy. The basis of this rant was the allegedly poor attitude of the Core Rails Dev team towards the deployment of Rails apps.

Recently a provocative post appeared on the DreamHost blog titled How Ruby could be much bettter. Its an interesting piece which lashes out at Rails for its poor performance as a platform for Shared Hosting environments. I would have to agree with most of this post. I very much enjoy writing Rails applications, it is very good at simplifying data driven web apps and I sometimes wish that PHP had something similarly easy out of the box (yes I know about the various 3rd party frameworks) however after deploying my first production rails app I quickly relegated it to a pure hobby language. Was it really that bad? In a word: Absolutely. Almost anyone who has tried to deploy a rails app on shared hosting will agree with me, it is 50 times more complicated to deploy than anything else I’ve ever toyed with.

DHH then responded and stated that people should quit whining and get involved. I agree with this, DreamHost and other Rails hosts should spend more time and energy working with the core rails team however I don’t agree with DHH on one thing: He states that there is no motivation for him to improve this himself.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. DHH as the “public leader” of the Rails community is always pushing the point that Rails is the “quick and painless” way do web development. If he wants this to be true then he has to realise that the majority of the web is composed of small sites. Sites which cannot afford nor justify a dedicated server. Sites which must be served on shared hosting. I would argue that Rails can never be taken seriously as a language unless it is easy to deploy whether that be on dedicated equipment or on shared hosting and no-one who has tried rails can argue that in its current state it is easy to deploy on either.