What's new in Rails 5?
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What's new in Rails 5?
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Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#2Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification.
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Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, just that recently they caught my attention and I am contemplating to choose one for an upcoming CMS project.
Would like to know if these frameworks each has its own segment or/and sweetspots, or they kind of compete against each other and the choice is mostly personal preference?
The goal is to hear what people like/dislike on a particular framework. Inputs from those who have worked with multiple frameworks will be awesome.
Thanks in advance.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#3Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
> choose one for an upcoming CMS project.
Thing is, none are CMS's. If that's what you need, why would you start with a framework? Sure it's fun to build and I always think I can do better than the existing CMS's do, but it's never a good use of my time - or good for the client.
Please, if you need a CMS, use a CMS. If you need a Content Management Framework (CMF) one of the above could save time. If it's an application surrounded by managed content, your choices are different again. But please don't reinvent the wheel if you can avoid it.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#4Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
> choose one for an upcoming CMS project. Thing is, none are CMS's. If that's what you need, why would you start with a framework? Sure it's fun to build and I always think I can do better than the existing CMS's do, but it's never a good use of my time - or good for the client. Please, if you need a CMS, use a CMS. If you need a Content Management Framework (CMF) one of the above could save time. If it's an applicat…
I agree with the above. That said, even if you are doing something new, you don't need to reinvent the wheel – it may be worthwhile taking a look at https://www.contentful.com/ (not affiliated, just an interesting service) and utilising their API to build an application which purely delivers the added value.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#5Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
As someone who's hosted and fixed a lot of CMS in recent years I'll say this: choose a solution that's fit for the individual purpose.
All CMS' suck, a bit like all OS' suck. As soon as you do anything non-standard their inherit flexibility becomes a burden. If you have skills in rails and need an off the shelf CMS find a popular one and use it you like but if you need to create a web 'application' look at Sinatra, rails or whatever but don't use a CMS as the foundation for an application.
Most of all, if my team and I have one take away: Stay far away from Drupal and people that preach its relevance. It is a world of hurt with an 'expert beginner' community. That has cost so many organisations more time and money than they ever anticipated.
Treat ever 'off he shelf' product with a degree of disposability - don't get locked in and never get into the trap that you've chosen 'the best'.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#6This is a great summary, and there look to be some really interesting things coming in Rails 5. Two thoughts:
1) I hope ActionCable is as seamless to integrate and works as well as Rails features ought to; you can, of course, achieve web sockets right now using Faye or various other implementations, but it's quite complex to get right (though the faye-rails gem is pretty handy) - and realtime functionality is becoming more and more important.
2) I wish they'd just give up on Turbolinks. Maybe some people are using it and love it, but it's always the first thing I turn off when I start a new Rails project, and I know quite a few people who feel the same. For those of us who never thought it was a good idea in the first place, I'm not sure any number of improvements are going to change our minds.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#7Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
As someone who's hosted and fixed a lot of CMS in recent years I'll say this: choose a solution that's fit for the individual purpose. All CMS' suck, a bit like all OS' suck. As soon as you do anything non-standard their inherit flexibility becomes a burden. If you have skills in rails and need an off the shelf CMS find a popular one and use it you like but if you need to create a web 'application' look at Sinatra, r…
I've worked with Drupal 6 years ago. I think it was awesome if all you need is a web site with custom workflows in the content creation. It made you suffer, however, if you started to turn the web site into an app for the public (anything more than custom filters for your lists and I think you are in this territory). The problem is a typical web site (even in those days) almost always turned into an app.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#8Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
I haven't used Laravel, but PHP tends to be relatively easy to get a development environment running as well as deploying on shared host type environments. On the flip side, the application becomes ever intertwined with the host environment, and beyond that, PHP libraries and frameworks tend to lack a lot of discipline that you find in other languages (that is, you find yourself pondering things like, "what if I were running this across many boxes, oh it'd just break..."), so 12-factor readiness (which helps when you want to run your app on more than one machine) tends to be an afterthought.
I haven't worked with Phoenix or even Erlang/Beam that much (though I've used Rabbit quite a bit). I think the overall model of the runtime is brilliant, but I'm not sure you need to buy in to the whole ecosystem to benefit from the learnings of it. There are actor systems for a lot of languages (Celluloid and Akka come to mind). Celluloid works nicely for weird long running things. I'm not totally sure how much it matters for your typical web app that would work fine enough with a CGI model (though I guess it's not totally different).
I've only played with Meteor, but I've used Node and React pretty extensively. React in particular is brilliant. It provides a nice way of thinking about the UI of your app in a more functional way. Of course, the devil's in the details, but it works pretty well. I'm less keen on Node as a backend language. A lot of backend code is between the lines, waiting on the DB or dealing with crazy errors. Node and JavaScript aren't very good at those things today. ES7 Async functions have some promise (hah!), but interoperating between libraries can be a little confusing at first.
Rails is an old friend of mine. You can do a lot with Rails, and it's almost sacrilege to say these days, but a well written monolithic, non-javascript heavy Rails app can be a joy to work in. It's pretty good for CMS type content; I've used it a bit to build various web stores to good effect. Things can get hairy when you try and step outside of "the Rails way", but that's less of an issue these days. It can also be a little funky using the asset pipeline with newer frontend libs, but there's that nifty source that packages frontend libraries as gems (the name eludes me at the moment).
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#9Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
If you need something complex and bespoke, build it yourself with something like Rails/Elixir/Whatever - your choice will depend mostly on your preference of tools/language/community as they are all quite flexible if you know them well.
Rails is suitable if you're greenfielding a complex new site (as would be Go or Elixir), Laravel probably if you like PHP (haven't used it), definitely not Drupal, Typo3, Wordpress etc if you are thinking of extending them in any significant way. Meteor doesn't strike me as particularly suitable for a CMS. Django might be worth looking at as it has built-in admin which is more CMS-like than others?
Since you mention building a CMS, my 2 cents on that:
If you need something very simple which is a good fit for a particular CMS and/or are on a very limited budget, just use a prebuilt CMS product and adjust some templates, otherwise you're reinventing a lot for not much gain. Doesn't sound like you want this option.
If you are producing a bespoke site consider writing most of what you need from scratch rather than trying to use modules/plugins etc. because the capability to use modules/plugins tends to invert authority in an app, and require you to do the things the framework way or not at all. Every bit of code you import from elsewhere comes with a significant cost in maintenance, security and complexity. So don't choose a framework in the hope you can just plug things other people have written together and make it all work.
Avoid CMS products which try to allow the end user to customise records (custom fields, nodes etc), install hundreds of badly written modules, and do a limited form of programming by manipulating records or templates in the database (I'm thinking of things like Drupal and to a lesser extent Wordpress). If you try to use them for something complex it will usually lead to an unmaintainable morass of poorly understood code.
Re: What's new in Rails 5?
#10Minor clarification: what i meant below is I plan to build a portal with major feature being CMS, not planning to rewrite an CMS from scratch, instead I will source in Github for the module that can be ported/plugged in right away with some modification. ----- Right now, the web frameworks that are on my radar are: Laravel(PHP), Phoenix(Elixir), React+Meteor(JS), and RoR(Ruby). This list is by no means exhaustive, ju…
I haven't used Laravel, but PHP tends to be relatively easy to get a development environment running as well as deploying on shared host type environments. On the flip side, the application becomes ever intertwined with the host environment, and beyond that, PHP libraries and frameworks tend to lack a lot of discipline that you find in other languages (that is, you find yourself pondering things like, "what if I were…
> there's that nifty source that packages frontend libraries as gems (the name eludes me at the moment).
Are you thinking of Rails Assets?