Either way, I'm very much looking forward to using the new version.

To me that's like how we in the past used Flash to play sounds in Campfire. Or reimplemented a poller in Erlang. Or use nodejs for the development Pow server. Use all the great tools available in the niches where it makes sense.

But the bulk of Basecamp is exactly the type of application that makes wonderful sense to do in Ruby and Rails. We've been sending down chunks of HTML in response to Ajax requests since we started doing these types of apps in 2005. So far I haven't seen anything to make me reconsider that approach for the majority cases.

Huge fan of your work. Been in love with Rails since the pre 1.0 days. Our team internally (we have an existing Rails 3 app that we want to improve rendering performance) has been going back and forth with "Rails should emit JSON and render client side" and "We should be smarter about caching and AJAX-ifying our pages".

Your post has given more ammunition to the Rails-only side, so that is really awesome; thanks for that!

There are reasonable arguments on both sides.

For Rails Improvement: * We know Rails * Scaling Rails is a solved problem * You can "just throw money at it"

For JS UI: * We know Javascript (http://www.github.com/toura/mulberry) * Why spend server $$ on boring HTML rendering? * We have better GUI test tools in the framework side (we can unit test our componentized JS GUI much easier than a mashed-together Rails ERB HTML) * We don't have that much money to throw at it, and that's wasteful besides

Presupposing, of course, that the server rendering JSON takes less time than stitching together ERB and the developer toolkit isn't any harder, would you find it more interesting?

Thanks,

-- Matt

I find the complexity needed in having MVCs on both client and server side to be the main problem. Especially since much of what applications like Basecamp are not all that heavy on the UI-interaction. A few bits are, like a calendar, so we use it there.

But obviously you can make it work either way. Just like Facebook manages to make PHP work. And some crazy kids still use Java. You should pick a development environment and style that fits your brain and your sensibilities. If you think client-side development is lovely, then by all means, go to town. Some people even think JavaScript is still as well as Ruby and that you don't even need CoffeeScript -- peace be with them.

Thanks for the reply. Look forward to using Basecamp NEXT (we use all the 37 signals products here) and seeing the evolution of your process as you continue.

-- Matt

DHH, I think you misunderstood here; I believe Jeremy's referring to the blog post where you said Basecamp Next had almost as many lines of CoffeeScript as lines of Ruby. I think that's where the 50/50 number came from.

I'm less curious about the performance here than I am about the maintainability. I saw a tweet where somebody said he'd done things the same way and encountered a maintenance nightmare -- he mentioned nested caching and pjax specifically -- but without context or detail, I'm taking that with a grain of salt. I think disregarding it completely would be a mistake too, though.

It's also kind of tautological that DHH is going to have a more pleasant experience developing in Rails than he is in other frameworks. ;-)

The maintainability story with pjax+caching is exactly the same as its always been with a Rails app. We just celebrated 8 years with Basecamp. That's a pretty good run.

You can write shit, unmaintainable code in anything, but to point at pjax and granular key-based caching schemes as somehow specifically prone to this? What? That doesn't make any sense to me.

We also had a swanky in-house client-side MVC framework cooking with Cinco. We used it once for Basecamp Mobile and while it was a good experience and the end result was great, it did little to sway my thinking on client-side MVC being a step forward in programming happiness (one of the key things I evaluate platforms by).

Again, it's perfectly fine to have a different opinion. I don't like the aesthetics nor the sensibilities of Python code much, but I certainly respect that people can make cool shit with it and even that they might enjoy the process.

The hoopla here is over the terribly flawed notion that client-side MVC is somehow The Future of web development and if you don't follow that pattern, you're living in The Past. Ha.

To take things to the extreme, if you chose to write Basecamp Next in pure x86 assembly (for speed, of course), I think we'd all agree that the code would be much more prone to maintainability problems. Similarly, it is plausible that choosing to write Basecamp Next entirely with pjax+backend MVC+granular key-based caching could be more prone to maintainability problems. Not that I have any particular reason to believe it will, but we're wondering if there are any particular reasons you believe it won't?

The granular caching scheme is similarly just a fragment caching setup using key-based expiration. Nothing new here, just that we used it to full effect.

So you're free to claim that writing Ruby on Rails applications are somehow inherently hard to maintain, but you'd be fighting against 8+ years of evidence to the contrary. Versus, you know, a very short amount of comparable evidence for JavaScript MVC applications based on current, recent frameworks.

I'd like to hear more about this, ideally in a blog post or two. I think a lot of people were waiting for Cinco's release, certainly I was, because we wanted to see what you'd do with it. The fact that you have Basecamp Next running without it certainly says something, but I'd be a lot more interested to find out what the specific tradeoffs were.

I think this is a key point and is one reason that server-side approaches will be relevant for a long time to come. Some applications, such as Gmail and Pivotal Tracker, feel a lot like desktop apps, and heavy use of client-side code is a necessity in these cases. But many—I'd argue the vast majority—of web applications produce a better user experience when they feel like ordinary web pages. I don't see that changing any time soon.

there's a lot you can do browser-side these days which would be insanely masochistic without client-side MVC, but that doesn't change the fact that lots of very useful apps run on the ordinary web pages model.

Neither flash, flex or silverlight are being pushed these days for these kind of services.

Like the new design and with that I don't mean so much how it looks but more how it looks like it's going to feel using it.

1. Controlling how long page render takes at the server is under the developer control.

2. The size of network load is under developer control.

3. Client side optimization are under developer control.

OP is saying 1 is low; 2 is low(not much difference between html load and json load); and 3 is low as there isn't much going on at client side.

Other than that:

1. User network is slow, hence leading to large load times.

Go bake potatoes - can't help.

2. User is located at a distant ___location from the server.

If the user is part of a market which the company sees as profitable, the server can be mirrored.

Or else you can go bake potatoes.

Rails was literally lifted out of Basecamp into a standalone framework that works great for CRUD-style apps. You might personally prefer another approach or think this design failed but Rails was definitely designed for this use case.