Rewriting in Rails -- A Practical Examination

Posted: Tue, 4 April 2006 | permalink | No comments

[Note: this article was mostly written some weeks ago; I left it in my "to be edited" box and then promptly forgot about it. So any and all temporal references are way out of whack. Since originally writing this article, I have commenced an incremental rewrite of an in-house business management application from crazy-PHP (a common -- some may say overwhelmingly so -- dialect of the language noted for it's complete lack of any sort of good software development practices, such as the creation and use of functions (!)) into Rails. Articles on this effort will be appearing presently.]

Almost immediately after I'd finished writing my previous discussion on why rewriting software is evil, I decided to make a little experiment. What I did was take a fairly well factored PHP application, and rewite (a portion of) it in Rails.

My intent in this was not to produce a production-quality rewrite. I have no interest in proliferating yet more functionally equivalent clones on the world. Instead, I undertook the work simply to get a feel for (a) writing a whole, traditional, Rails app in a short space of time, (b) how quick Rails really was to produce an application, and (c) whether wholesale rewrites really are as boring and life-sucking as I imagined them to be.

My methodology was this: with a small amount of knowledge of the target application (SysCP), the existing database schema and templates, and a weekend, rewrite as much of SysCP as I could in a close-as-possible reproduction of critical SysCP functionality.

My summary results are: rewrites are as boring as I thought they would be, Rails is powerful but fairly complex and slightly buggy when you get down into it (especially if you're working from an existing -- possibly suboptimal -- database schema), but overall, Rails is Way Good Stuff.

On the boredom aspect -- I had two days to write code. I had some domestic duties to attend to (walk the dog, visit the hardware store, help my wife with attaching a new bag rack to her bike, mow the lawn, etc) but on the whole, it was dedicated to programming. I've spent whole days (hell, 40 hour marathon stretches) cutting code before. I knew this wasn't a six-month deathmarch, but only a weekend experiment. Despite that, I feel that my motivation levels were lower than they normally are when coding. I can only imagine what it must feel like, two weeks into several months of hard core coding, knowing that you'll end up with what you had before, functionally speaking.

If you are going to do the rewrite thing (and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your soul if you do), then pick the right project. SysCP is large masses of tangled PHP (is there any other kind?) but it has a fair amount of local and global structure once you get down to it -- for instance, it's quite well factored into business logic and display, and the code is broken down fairly logically by action handler, so you get entire source files that look like this:

  if ($action == 'edit')
  {
    // 150 lines of twisty passage PHP
  }
  else if ($action == 'new')
  {
    // Another 150 lines
  }
  // repeat for another few actions

and so on. The nice thing about this is that, if you have to look for how something works, you can almost certainly find it in one place in the source. Deciphering it might be another matter, but at least you've got something to start from.

As I mentioned, the display in SysCP is pretty nicely split off from the logic -- a large number of templates, with common header/footer files, with some small parts in common templatettes. Some HTML is still generated within the actions, but due to the above action-based structure, it's usually fairly easy to identify all of the HTML that will be associated with a particular action and turn it into a coherent Rails template.

I would dread doing a rewrite of the presentation layer of, say, IRM. It's idea of well-factored presentation is to separate print statements from logic by a blank line. To my great shame, I've had the reins of IRM for a year, and it's still this bad. I claim it's because I hate HTML coding with a vengeance, but I think I'm actually just scared to try and tame that particular monster. (Update: Martin Stevens has been doing some good work turning IRM's HTML into Savant templates. The only downside is that I can hear his manic laughter -- caused by IRM's insanity slowly infecting him -- all the way from England, and it's keeping me awake at night).

I also had to re-learn that most hated but most important of lessons -- that, no matter how much reading you may have done, until you've cut chunks of code in a language or environment, you have no idea how it actually behaves in your brain. Specifically, I spent a fair amount of my alloted rewrite time learning a few little lessons in how Rails actually behaves, and all of it's cool little features. Of course, everyone is going to have this pain, and I've suffered it in every language that I've done any appreciable amount of programming in, but it's always a shock to the system that -- after all this time programming -- a new language still makes my brane tingle curiously for a while. Luckily, I'd read and digested all of both the Pickaxe (Programming Ruby) and AWDWR (Agile Web Development with Rails) so I knew what was possible, I just usually wasn't sure how exactly, so I spent a lot of time with my head in the books.

Rails' little foibles also bit me in the bum more than once. For example, I spent over an hour (a no foolin' hour) trying to hunt down what I was doing stupid in my code to make Rails completely forget about the value of a couple of my fields. The answer turned out to be to restart Webrick (Rails' internal webserver for development testing), and the problem cleared right up. You could hear my screams of anguish from the moon (even through the vacuum of space -- it was a lot of anguish).

Rails isn't the Final And Ultimate Solution To The Webapp Problem, but it's a good start. There is near-zero administrative bumf when you're writing a Rails app. Rails is fairly intelligent about working out what you want done from the world around it. Code generators (which produces sensible, minimalist templates -- not the ugly, unmaintainable behemoths produced by Visigoth Studio, which has given the whole code generation world a bad name) handle a lot of the low-level "oh bugger, I have to add a new file" feeling. It's very, very anal about project structure, but (in contrast to many other bondage-and-discipline frameworks I've looked at in the past) this structure seems almost comforting (maybe I'm just getting old and turning into a satisficer).

What all this means is that you (a) don't write much code unless it moves you toward your goal, and (b) Common structure means that any Rails app will be fairly familiar to an incoming programmer. Unfortunately it also means that cunning wankers will, sooner or later, work out a whole pile of ugly tricks and contortions to get themselves out of Rails' comfortable-but-no-doubt-incompatible-with-many-people's-ways-of-thinking straitjacket, which I will (sooner or later) end up maintaining. Like many of Rails' (and Ruby's) features, though, I don't see them being any more abusable than most features of any programming language or environment -- and at least they're powerful and useful (unlike, say, register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc, magic single-character variables, mandatory indenting, or banning tabs as indent characters -- I thought I'd spread the slagging amongst lots of languages).

Productivity-wise, although I was only just kicking off my Rails webapp knowledge, I felt I was doing fairly well. From experience, what I produced in my weekend was roughly on par with what I could produce in PHP in the same amount of time, had the situation been reversed. Considering that I have about 3 weeks of Ruby/Rails knowledge, and about 5 years of PHP experience, I think that's a big win. (Update: I've since produced a DNS management applet for work in about 6 hours billable time, and a virtual mail account application in about 12 hours, both using Rails. There isn't a hope in hell that I could have performed a similar feat in PHP, especially with the same amount of inherent flexibility that the Rails solutions contain).

Overall, my impression of wholesale rewrites as being soul-sucking experiences stands. I suggest they be approached with the greatest of care, and only be permitted after an appropriate period of psychological counselling. There is plenty of code that needs rewriting (but why do I always have to find it?) but replacing it by doing an rm -rf on the source tree and starting again is not the answer.


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