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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#131

Post by fergie »

Rails really nailed the problems of web development as it was 10 years ago by (rightly) pointing out that 97.2% of web projects were all about making an application server talk nicely to a relational database and then generating a front end that reflected the data model and that had javascript that Just Worked (everywhere).

Web dev is in a different place now. Developers don't generally install and maintain application servers from the ground up. Scriptalicious was superceded by jQuery, which in turn was supplanted by vanilla js actually becoming useful. Relational databases are not quite as dead as some people would lead you to believe, but other types of DB are much more common now (key-value stores, search indexes, etc).

Rails was probably one of the last truly open source projects (Most OS these days is to some degree 'owned/developed' by Big Tech) to get big traction and for that it deserves credit. Just the idea that a Danish web consultant could hack together something that became popular and which then allowed him to literally retire and become a racing driver before he hit 30 should inspire us all.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#132

Post by ryanbrunner »

zaarn wrote: post #67
sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

RoR has always been rather impenetrable to me, more-so than some late-stage/terminal Node-based projects. I recently wanted to remove IP logging in a RoR application but I was unable to find the relevant code anywhere, the only hits that grep spat out where the migrations and I couldn't figure out how to rip all that out. In the end a project developer pointed me to the correct file and I had to change a single line…

Rails is definitely a framework where it requires some knowledge of the framework to really be effective. The adherence to convention over configuration means that a whole lot of things are pretty opaque, and if you don't know the conventions it can seem impossible to know how something is happening (logging is a great example). Javascript is the opposite extreme - nothing is assumed and everything is explicit, so there's a clear and obvious spot (at least in well architected programs) where something is configured.

When you know the framework well, however, I find one of Rails' strengths is that it massively decreases the time it takes to get familiar with a codebase. There's never a question of how a developer has organized their code, or configured logging (to take your example), because it's not a choice that Rails gives you - every project is going to work the same.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#133

Post by esistgut »

sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

I'm exploring Nest [0] for my next project. It is a "glue framework" on top of Typescript and many Node libraries, with an Angular like style. Every Node library used has a framework module which provides the integration with the framework [1] so it appears to be both flexible and easy to use. I am just starting to explore Nest and I'm liking it, my previous experience on the backend was on Django for many years and Nest seems like a breath of fresh decoupled air, coming from this heavy monolithic experience.

[0] https://nestjs.com/

[1] https://github.com/nestjs

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#134

Post by SkyPuncher »

thinkingkong wrote: post #16

I mean... Let's pause for a minute and remove the year, and remove the language / framework. What are we trying to accomplish? If we know something really well and there are enough developers to support an ecosystem and the talent pool in your is big enough just use whatever you want. PHP in 2018? SURE. C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist) Rails in 2018? Youre damn right I would. GO in 2018? OK. Fine. Whatever. This is…

This is pretty much my thought. I lead a jumpstarted development effort for a startup last year (we used an agency to get through the initial build). We looked into several options, but ultimately decided to use Rails. Why? We all knew exactly what we could expect from Rails and we knew we could get it to work in the way we wanted without too much hassle.

Sure, we might hit growth problems in years but we can cross that bridge down the road.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#135

Post by ryanbrunner »

paulie_a wrote: post #13
whalesalad wrote: post #4

I commented a few months ago that if I was starting a new company today I’d use Rails without hesitation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17355776 Well, I’m starting a company and our current prototype is Rails. I don’t regret my decision at all, although after spending the last four years writing exclusively Python it’s been a little jarring. The muscle memory is still there though and after two weeks I’m almos…

To be fair the technology stack is almost irrelevant when you are starting a company. write it in perl, python, rails, hell write it in old school cgi and use c++. It all comes down to how many sales did you make today. The clients will rarely care what language was used behind the scenes.

At a minimum you should be writing your first iteration of a product in something that's clear and easy to understand, if only so that the effort of translating it to something else when needed is less painful. Rails is a great candidate for that.

But even with that being said, prototypes and v1s have a nasty habit of continuing along far past their originally intended expiration date, and if your only criteria is what gets sales today with no regard for future maintainability, you're taking on a very significant debt that is going to be hard to repay when you do need your tech to be easy to work with and performant.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#136

Post by ryanbrunner »

zerogvt wrote: post #116

I'm not a web or compiler/interpreter dev so this is probably a noob question but here it goes anyway. If the main complain about ruby is that it is slow then why not trying to make it faster? I don't know how easy or feasible that is but is there an effort towards that?

In my experience this is mostly relevant to people writing benchmark blog posts. Certainly not entirely, but I've worked on a few apps that would easily be considered "at scale" and 99% of the time, speed issues with the language itself are dwarfed by database performance and issues with the code written in that language.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#137

Post by bshimmin »

zaarn wrote: post #100
petepete wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recently wanted to remove IP logging in a RoR application but I was unable to find the relevant code anywhere, the only hits that grep spat out where the migrations and I couldn't figure out how to rip all that out. Usually you'd just create a custom logger[0] and tell Rails to use it[1] [0] https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.5.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger.... [1] https://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html#rails-g…

It wasn't putting the IP in the log but in the database and along the username and session data, there is an open ticket about that behavior too. Since I'm in Europe/Germany, this kind of data storage would have been a no-go even before the GDPR.

It sounds like you had to remove the Trackable module from Devise - which would indeed be one line of code to change in a Rails app, but quite hard to figure out if you didn't know. However, Devise is a third party gem which is often used with Rails but isn't actually a part of Rails, so can you really blame Rails for this? (And, unless it's for a very specific string, is grepping a codebase that you have no understanding of ever really a successful strategy?)

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#138

Post by fsloth »

golergka wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is slowly getting there thanks to Unity efforts with HPC# and Microsoft's improvements on SIMD support, stack allocation and slices. Then on the browser you are stuck with GLSL 3.0 shaders, or any JS library that generates them on the fly. But yeah for the layer that actually talks to the metal, it is still going to be C++ for many years, specially thanks to the ongoing language improvements since C++11 revision.…

I'm a fulltime Unity lead developer and I love C# as a business logic (or game logic) language, but it becomes quite ugly for hot code that is perfomance-critical. Once you get thousands of objects that you have to process every frame, you have to throw the usual C# object-oriented style and things like Linq (and I'm a fan of Linq!) out of the window and write code that reads like C. And when you get to object pools,…

"things like Linq"

It's really easy to accidentally create a simple Linq query that underneath turns into O(N^2) and suddenly the production application crawls to a halt. Actually happened.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#139

Post by nickjj »

joelbluminator wrote: post #87
Jedi72 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir/Phoenix is the spiritual successor to Rails. Same philosophy of batteries included, developer productivity focussed etc. But with lots of great new shiny things, for example websockets is built directly into the framework, its not an add-on. Its not a direct upgrade, but if you value Rails definitely check it out

The Elixir community would LIKE it to be a spiritual successor for Rails, but it really isn't. If only because of the learning curve of understanding Elixir. Sorry to disappoint anyone but Phenoix is not going to be the new Rails/Django.

> If only because of the learning curve of understanding Elixir. Sorry to disappoint anyone but Phenoix is not going to be the new Rails/Django.

The learning curve isn't too bad.

I've been a Rails developer for quite some time and am picking up Elixir / Phoenix in my spare time while building a single side project. This is my first real attempt at picking up a functional language too.

The project I'm building is an ambitious project (users, accepting stripe / paypal payments, lots of data modeling, real time aspects, decent amount of logic I haven't implemented in other more familiar frameworks, etc.) but thanks to the community and open source projects to look at I'm making reasonable progress.

Of course I'm not as productive as I am in Rails but that's because I'm only putting in a few hours a week into this project (while learning Elixir / Phoenix as I go).

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#140

Post by ryanbrunner »

iamleppert wrote: post #110

One thing you'll run into with rails in 2018 for web development is it's going to be hard to find developers and only getting harder by the day. Rails developers are aging. They are no longer your 20 year old hipsters, that stereotype has long since gone, they have families now and boy are they EXPENSIVE. React is what people new to web development are LEARNING and that's all you need to care about. You can get react…

Rails and React aren't comparable technologies. Most Rails developers are using some sort of front-end framework (whether React, Vue or something else) for at least a significant portion of their code. Virtually all React developers are going to work with a backend of some flavour.

For better or worse, the days of writing web applications that primarily ship HTML from server to browser are long over.

Ignoring that, I do think it's fair to say that "Rails does something that most other frameworks don't", which is provide a batteries-included, convention over configuration framework that makes a lot of decisions for you and lets you work with an extremely flexible language. That may not be everyone's cup of tea, but that's not what the Javascript world is selling right now (quite the opposite).

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