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Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

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Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#31

Post by danso »

rubyfan wrote: post #11
danso wrote: post #7

Elixir's Phoenix is where a few former Rails folks have migrated to, so it shares a few of the ideas that made Rails so appealing: https://hackernoon.com/phoenix-is-better-but-rails-is-more-p... A list of companies using Elixir/Phoenix: https://github.com/doomspork/elixir-companies Discussion on how Bleacher Report (1.5B pageviews/month) moved from Rails to Phoenix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13606139

I used to work at a company in a similar vertical as BR also linked off CNN frequently and also running Rails. I understand the scalability challenges that might lead someone to something like Erlang and Elixir. Curious, what’s your take on why this hasn’t caught on?

I've only played around with Phoenix/Elixir so can't claim to have any special knowledge. But I've heard it argued that functional languages/frameworks aren't as common in startups as expected because functional programming isn't as popular among current developers, nor as commonly taught in school. And Erlang seems to be particularly specialized:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277797

Elixir is relatively new (2011), Phoenix even newer. Maybe it's too early to say whether or not it will take off in the same way Rails did? And maybe it won't ever take off because Node/Express brings sufficient performance while allowing developers to use JavaScript, arguably the most popular language in production today.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#32

Post by ivan_gammel »

rubyfan wrote: post #24
rubyfan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring doesn’t seem as straightforward to me as I would hope. Play is similar, there is promise there but just too open ended.

The funny thing I see on the springboot quickstart page: Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration And the very next thing is a maven xml config.

It's not a requirement to use Maven, so their statement is correct even in this extended sense. There's Gradle after all.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#34

Post by o2l »

neilwilson wrote: post #30

I think it is more 'Ruby isn't sexy any more' because people older than 25 use it. It's just the usual thing of the next generation not wanting to listen to the music the previous generation did. These things come in cycles. I remember when 'Hot Java' was sexy and cool and only throwbacks wrote C. (And when C was sexy and cool and only throwbacks wrote COBOL, etc) There were lots of other languages and frameworks aro…

That's a very good insight.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#35

Post by BilalBudhani »

I was pondering over the same question some time back which lead me into experimenting with frameworks in NodeJS and oh boy, I missed Ruby On Rails on every single line I wrote in those other frameworks. I whole heartedly regret looking into other frameworks just because I felt Ruby On Rails isn't sexy anymore.

This experience made me double sure on why Ruby On Rails is one of the strongest & productive frameworks available. My advice is, don't look anywhere else if you're not facing any problem with your current stack.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#36

Post by jfaucett »

I'm a long time ruby developer and have switched to erlang/elixir now for about 2 years now. IMHO phoenix is at least as good as rails, personally I think its most often a better option when building large applications, though this is due mainly to elixir/erlang and OTP.

Elixir offers production grade options for all the major packages/libs you need and all the packages I've had to build have been the same kinds of minor things like api clients or whatever that I had to build a gem for when I was using ruby.

So phoenix/elixir is certainly a "real alternative" since I've been building production systems in it for 2 years.

lastly Phoenix is not quite as opinionated as rails, but its still very opinionated and any rails developer will feel very much at home there.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#37

Post by AlexAMEEE »

rubyfan wrote: post #24
rubyfan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring doesn’t seem as straightforward to me as I would hope. Play is similar, there is promise there but just too open ended.

The funny thing I see on the springboot quickstart page: Absolutely no code generation and no requirement for XML configuration And the very next thing is a maven xml config.

By no XML, they mean that you don't have to do any configuration in xml files. You can declare everything as a bean.

Example: // enabling ETAGS

    @Bean
    public Filter etagFilter() {
        return new ShallowEtagHeaderFilter();
    }
There is also the option to do many things in a yml file like you are used to from Rails.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#39

Post by LordHeini »

I quite like Lift which is a Scala framework allowing stupidly fast rapid prototyping (rails is really slow and clunky in comparison) . There are no routes and all the Javascript stuff is built in (so no annoying manual Ajaxcalls). It is multithreaded via Aktors and has build in comet for async stuff which is almost trivial to use. The example for using the framework a life webchat which is a handful of files with a few lines code each. On top the HTML is, well... proper HTML. No scull operators or such thing. The framework attaches functionality via css selectors in so called snippets which are like small controllers but not for an individual view but more for a specific functionality which helps with reusability. On top you get all the cool thing from scala like option types, static typing with type inference, the speed, multithreading and so on.

The biggest downside is the rather awful documentation (often outdated) and the missing migrations. I found it quite a step to lean since it is not an mvc framework and inherently stateful. There are a few free books however.

Re: Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?

#40

Post by neverminder »

Play Framework - supports both Scala and Java. It was inspired by RoR to be a lightweight alternative to such legacy behemoths like Spring. It's a full featured web framework based on Akka, scalable out of the box. Combination of Play/Scala/Slick gives you compile time safety for database queries - very few alternatives can offer that. Also, strict types significantly reduces your test coverage which is not possible on any dynamic languages.
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