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What's new in Rails 5?

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Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#21

Post by Jgrubb »

happywolf wrote: post #2

Minor 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…

Currently working for a company that has all of it's websites in Drupal, so my team is versed in PHP. I've been working with Drupal for 7 straight years.

I have this dream of not having to work with Drupal ever again, so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years.

I'd go Rails, and here's why.

Rails is easy to learn - even if your team has never written Ruby it's an easy language to pick up with way fewer gotchas than either PHP or JS. I've evaluated Laravel, and it's probably the best PHP option out there right now, but knowing Rails, I often find myself hating how much code you have to write to accomplish the same thing in Laravel just by virtue of it being PHP. The resulting code feels clunky (though, that's surely just because I also suck at programming).

Rails is extremely mature - it's been around for over a decade. The upgrade from 2 to 3 was painful, the upgrade from 3 to 4 was much less so. I imagine the upgrade from 4 to 5 will be as well, and so on. The ecosystem is very filled out, the package mgmt story is there, the testing story is there. These are new developments on the wider PHP scene that will probably takes several more years to reach the level of adoption and familiarity that Ruby enjoys. I love writing JS, but the whole ecosystem over there is in this constant state of tectonic upheaval right down to the language (ES6), and unlearning the old gotchas so I can learn the new ones doesn't appeal to me right now.

Rails is exceptionally well documented in terms of blog posts, the Rails Guides, and the API docs. None of these other technologies even come close. This is especially true of Laravel, and I've only ever read 1 blog post about Phoenix, so good luck with that.

This was supposed to be short, sorry.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#22

Post by Jgrubb »

porker wrote: post #3
happywolf wrote: post #2

Minor 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 actually disagree. There's a big difference between reinventing the wheel - which happens because you didn't know that somebody else had thought of this before and already solved the problem - and building your own wheel because none of the off-the-shelf wheels work that great for your needs.

If this is a small business website and will never be built on ever again, then absolutely ignore the hate and go Wordpress. If it's something that might be extended over the years into use cases beyond just a webform to post an article with a title and a body then it's worth evaluating if you might be able to custom tailor a better fit for your business.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#23

Post by technion »

bshimmin wrote: post #6

This 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 becomin…

>2) I wish they'd just give up on Turbolinks

Ditto for Coffeescript. I realise you can't just remove it, but the whole dev community is raving about ES6 - there's a whole of JS devs who could be a lot more interested in Rails.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#24

Post by porker »

girvo wrote: post #18
grey-area wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 et…

I despise Wordpress, and have definitely shaved off too many years of my life struggling with its utter insanity that is its core/plugin ecosystem... However, check out Themosis. It's basically dragged Wordpress kicking and screaming into 2015, and considering clients will still sometimes demand the familiar Wordpress admin if you live in agency land, it's a worthy framework to have in your toolkit.

> Themosis

Now that looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.

/me goes back to trying to apply visual design changes to a site 'built' via Visual Composer... kill me now.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#25

Post by berkes »

Jgrubb wrote: post #21
happywolf wrote: post #2

Minor 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…

Currently working for a company that has all of it's websites in Drupal, so my team is versed in PHP. I've been working with Drupal for 7 straight years. I have this dream of not having to work with Drupal ever again, so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this fo…

> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years.

This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so almost impossible to move out of Drupal.

So I wrote some op-eds on why Drupal was not always a good choice for projects (most notably: government projects) citing from my experience as rescue-consultant-for-failing-drupal-projects.

And then I wrote http://berk.es/2012/10/01/farewell-drupal/ and declined all work Drupal related.

It does not have to be Rails. It could be Opal, Django, Spring, Symphony, Yii, anything. But if you are really unhappy with Drupal, as you seem to be, cut the ties. There's more then enough work out there.

And working in an environment that is built for developers (instead of building a webapp by clicking checkboxes and clumsy html interfaces in the Drupal backend). Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want.

I'm now a happy Rails developer. Who learns new things every day. I like my job a lot; so much, that I can't imagine not coding for work (And already I am almost always that Old Guy on the job). In ten years it'll probably not be Rails anymore, but WhateverFancyFramework is the default then. And because within Rails I really learned coding, picking up new languages, frameworks and whatnots is not that hard at all, anymore.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#26

Post by Jgrubb »

berkes wrote: post #25
Jgrubb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently working for a company that has all of it's websites in Drupal, so my team is versed in PHP. I've been working with Drupal for 7 straight years. I have this dream of not having to work with Drupal ever again, so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this fo…

> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…

Dude, you and me bump into each other all over the place. I just tweeted you a couple days ago about the Drupal Assoc job board. Used to run into you on r/drupal agreeing on how there will be no Drupal 9, etc.

I mostly just do everything else in the org - infrastructure, architecture, mgmt, etc - and let the other guys actually do the Drupaling. Drupal is a minimal part of what I do day to day now, so it's not as if I hate my job. Quite the contrary. And I'm constantly learning new things and getting better as a dev, not just a Drupal dev. And the only one of my "really big ideas" that has yet to be implemented is the one where we build a custom (Rails) CMS and get out of Drupal/Features hell for good. And my boss doesn't even hate on the idea, it's just not the front burner item yet. The time will come, oh yes. It will...

Good bumping into you again.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#27

Post by danmaz74 »

technion wrote: post #23
bshimmin wrote: post #6

This 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 becomin…

>2) I wish they'd just give up on Turbolinks Ditto for Coffeescript. I realise you can't just remove it, but the whole dev community is raving about ES6 - there's a whole of JS devs who could be a lot more interested in Rails.

Turbolinks can create problems even to those who don't use them explicitly, but Coffeescript can't: if you don't like it, just don't use it, and it's as if it wasn't there. How would removing it from the asset compiler help you in any way?

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#28

Post by littlewing »

I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this:

The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby, but I respect the fact that the Javascript-client-side-heavy/"single-page" part of the app is where the magic is for at least a few years now- really several years.

Other than Rails helpers in the 2006-2008 timeframe being a big deal, Rails' has not ever really helped out a whole lot on the JS side, and you wouldn't expect it to. The asset pipeline is wonderful, and coffeescript support with in it is ok I guess, even though I don't use it. But, writing JS client-side is not any easier. To be a full-stack developer in today's world I have to accept the fact that Ruby, as much as I love it and would rather develop in it all day and night, is just not taking over in every facet of development. There is no Rubyscript on the client side taking over the world. There is ES6/Typescript- that is the future.

A substantial number of Ruby masters are jumping over to the Phoenix/Elixir bandwagon. I look at it, and want to like it, but I just haven't gotten into it yet. I know it is fast, but it just isn't as readable yet for me. And it won't solve the problem that the client still needs to be written primarily in Javascript.

And the answer is not Node either, because every serious Javascript developer I've talked to says, "Node is still not ready."

I just feel let down. I want to get excited about Rails again, but give me a path. I don't really like Ember a whole lot, because the community is just not where it is with Angular and React. Someone please take your favorite frameworks and show me how my life is supposed to get better by using them. Show me how it is fun. Bring back the magic, because right now it all just seems like more and more of a PITA as attention deficit has fully set in within the web application development community and there is no clear way ahead for the next few years.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#29

Post by mrmondo »

mattmanser wrote: post #14
mrmondo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's CMSes and OSes. You're looking for the plurals, so you definitely don't need to use a possessive apostrophe there because there's no ownership in the sentence. Also, because they're acronyms you pronounce by enunciating the words, my instinct would be to use OS's (as you would pronounce the 's, O-S-es). But that's up for debate. For example: The OS's kernel blew up (possessive apostrophe, the OS owns the kernel)…

Thank you for clarifying / pointing that out to me. I've never spent time to understand that an apostrophe used in this way made it possessive. I've taken that on board and will (hopefully) not make this mistake again.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#30

Post by technion »

danmaz74 wrote: post #27
technion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2) I wish they'd just give up on Turbolinks Ditto for Coffeescript. I realise you can't just remove it, but the whole dev community is raving about ES6 - there's a whole of JS devs who could be a lot more interested in Rails.

Turbolinks can create problems even to those who don't use them explicitly, but Coffeescript can't: if you don't like it, just don't use it, and it's as if it wasn't there. How would removing it from the asset compiler help you in any way?

There's a cultural impact - it's hard to look at Rails without being pushed in that direction.

Does it directly impact me now that I choose to ignore it? No. Does it impact a newcomer, particularly one that's into JS? Yes.

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