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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#301

Post by karmajunkie »

cutler wrote: post #256
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

Please, let's lose this Elixir = Ruby.new nonsense. Once you get beyond the superficial syntax similarities between Elixir and Ruby the 2 languages couldn't be further apart. Ruby is mutable/OOP whilst Elixir is immutable/FP. Diametrically opposite so anyone who is heavily invested in Ruby's OOP mindset is going to have a shock if they dive into Elixir.

This is the most salient point in the elixir thread so far. If you are heavily invested in OOP, no functional or immutable language is really going to do it for you. Period.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#302

Post by karmajunkie »

fishtoaster wrote: post #61
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

Elixir/Phoenix is great, and it's first-party support for websockets is an excellent selling point! That said, I feel compelled to mention that rails does have websockets built into the framework now too, as of Rails 5.

There is no comparison between those two socket implementations. There's several orders of magnitude difference between what elixir and Ruby will support on a single server there.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#303

Post by sho »

aantix wrote: post #162
SkyPuncher wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I consulted on a site that could get 50 million unique users in any given month, sometimes with large bursts of traffic. A heavy read site is trivial to scale these days. Serve static assets from CDNs, fragment cache the views, horizontally scale when needed. Rinse, repeat.

Exactly. I've also been involved with read-heavy Rails sites serving well in excess of 1000reqs/sec, and I know that others sites (Shopify et al) do way more. As you point out, it's all about having an intelligent caching strategy and extensive use of CDNs.

Most scaling issues I've seen on well-designed Rails sites have been to do with the DB, not the framework!

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#304

Post by krob »

bsenftner wrote: post #167
fsloth wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Vulkan/C? Metal/ObjC†/C? " Vulkan and C are a sane option. Although, with C and linear algebra one starts to miss C++ operator overloading and existing libraries like eigen [0] or glm[1] with their graphics and computational geometry targeting API:s really soon. If one deploys only to OS X/IOS, Metal and ObjC, sure. "From C libs you can probably get to bindings to other languages like D, Haskell, Rust, Go†." With th…

For the several dozen EA games I worked on, in C++, all operator overloading was banned. Too many fools play dumb tricks with operator overloading, so it was declared illegal. I don't miss it, as it is a fool's tool.

There is a better word for this.. People who use operator overloading are a bunch of shmucks (Stupid fools), as my Jewish grandfather would say :)

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#305

Post by nurettin »

bdcravens wrote: post #279
nurettin wrote: post #23

RoR is relevant as long as the community is active, as long as there is job demand (see crossover, Stackoverflow, etc.). It is an excellent framework with gems to act as plugins (rack middleware) to serve websockets, forums, admin interfaces all with a few lines of configuration. Google, Microsoft, Facebook all maintain Ruby libraries in GitHub. So as long as you are doing Joe's textile website, it is the right tool.…

> So as long as you are doing Joe's textile website, it is the right tool. I don't think Rails is the best tool for that. A static site or Wordpress are probably a better fit. > Cloud scaling rails can be expensive, as apparent from horror stories [0] but a few manually managed instances with a load balancer and good web servers can go a long way. It definitely can be, but I think most apps people are working on don'…

I think there is more to textile than displaying and selling clothes. But, YMMV.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#306

Post by fsloth »

wtetzner wrote: post #293
fsloth wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentence in the top of the readme for the github repo is: "Glium is no longer actively developed by its original author." Which links to: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/glium-post-mortem/7063 Which pretty much states that Glium is not a really long term viable solution at the moment. I've toyed with cool open source libraries for 20 years. I'm too old to get caught up with something new and shiny only to find out…

Immediately after that, it says: "That said, PRs are still welcome and maintenance is continued by the surrounding community." > Which pretty much states that Glium is not a really long term viable solution at the moment. Except what that post-mortem is _really_ saying is that OpenGL is not a long-term viable solution. The whole post-mortem is about the fact that OpenGL drivers are so buggy that you can't write porta…

"OpenGL drivers are so buggy that you can't write portable code to target it."

Sure, that's why generic non-platform specific OpenGL wrapper is a bad idea, unless you have an army of engineers to apply kludges and workarounds. I'm sorry the author had to find out this the hardest way. The quality of OpenGL drivers has always been like this.

One way of writing portable OpenGL is to look at what some popular game with open source is doing, and copy their approach, because the likelihood of a) the bugs that title triggered are mostly fixed and/or b) they managed to avoid the biggest potholes.

E.g. look at what Quake or Doom III does, etc.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#307

Post by danmaz74 »

I think that there is no better alternative to Rails to write the back-end for web/mobile applications in a very efficient and maintainable way, unless you have very demanding (and uncommon) requirements for performance and "web scale".

I also think that the most important part which is missing to make it even more relevant is a much easier (opinionated, convention-over-configuration and DRY) way to connect rails with React and similar frameworks. Something like generators to synchronise your data with a state manager in the front end (eg Redux). I even have some ideas about this, I just wished I had time to work on it.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#308

Post by lmm »

joelbluminator wrote: post #85
lmm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think an all-in-one framework is an advantage? As soon as you want to switch something out you end up fighting the framework and the tutorials. Better to start with dedicated libraries that each do one thing - it's inevitably where you're going to end up. (Not that I'd consider an untyped ecosystem in the first place, especially one as fond of "magic" (e.g. monkeypatching) as rails. I have sympathy for jus…

I think the types argument is bullshit but it's just my opinion. Do python or ruby devs really feel they are less productive than java devs because they have no types? What I see happening is languages like java becoming more dynamic (var etc) and languages like ruby/python getting better IDEs (auto completion will continue to improve).

> What I see happening is languages like java becoming more dynamic (var etc) and languages like ruby/python getting better IDEs (auto completion will continue to improve).

I agree that that's what's going to happen in the short term, but var doesn't mean becoming dynamic; type inference doesn't compromise soundness at all. I think it's going to be much easier for sound type systems to get good-enough inference (indeed Hindley–Milner already offers "perfect" inference: you don't need to write any explicit types if you don't want to) than for dynamic languages to retrofit soundness. And while one can live with a few unsound constructs as long as it's locally clear when unsoundness is happening, as soon as you have pervasive soundness issues with action-at-a-distance your type system becomes almost useless.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#309

Post by tonyedgecombe »

cutler wrote: post #258
sydd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for 2 things: Finding developers. while it's possible it's much harder that say Java. You'll be in trouble if you are not in a metropolis and need 5+ rails developers. Long term sustainability. While it will work for your MVP, at some point you will need to rewrite it in a language that sclaes to 10.000s of lines of code and that will be painful.

Yes, this is a commonly overlooked consequence of adopting Rails. Here in London recruiters are falling over themselves trying to hire Rails developers as so many companies built their stack on Rails. However, once you leave the capital demand for Rails more ore less evaporates. Rails only thrives in tech hubs, probably due to its association with startup culture. Once you leave the capital PHP, Java and ASP.Net domi…

Once you leave the capital everything evaporates.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#310

Post by collyw »

joelbluminator wrote: post #169
collyw wrote: post #89

Its kind of ridiculous that in this industry we are expected to jump on new trends every couple of years to stay current, rather than learn how to use the tools that we do have well. Sure we get some benefits, but 90 % of the time it seems we are just chasing fads. (Yes is my answer to the question).

That happens mostly in front end, backend world moves slower. It's why I just don't like front end coding anymore, I feel like I have better use of my time than learning a new framework every 3 years.

Front end is way worse, but a few years ago we were all told to jump on the Mongo bandwagon. Now we have serverless. Sue these things do have use cases but they are oversold a lot of the time.
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