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Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

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Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#21

Rails needs more opinionated decision on frontend story. Just pick ReactJS instead ? Not a bad idea. Or VueJS ? Neither a bad choice. It's the main reason i don't choose Rails over a universal Node.js stack for the HTML rendering part.

Also, their opinion is to provide a JSON API by default, so you can hook in a JS frontend app later if you want.

If you want it right from the start, you can create an api only rails project: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#23

Rails is a great monolith framework, but a monolith will eventually reach its limits, due to size/complexity of the team or the task at hand. I think providing a better story around how to prepare for or handle that transition would definitely serve Rails a lot better in the long run. But, as long as the main target audience of Rails is Basecamp (a saas tool with 12 developers), I don't see it in the future.

The company I work at is transitioning from a rails monolith to many smaller rails micro services - it’s the best if both worlds.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#24

As an individual developer, I don’t know a platform and framework that lets me do more with my time. I used rails recently for a new project to act both as the backend for an iOS app, an auth management system, a asynchronous worker manager, an upload manaager, and BI tool. Combined with the mature gem ecosystem and clear mechanics for putting everything together, I was up and running immediately, and was able to con…

I replaced `rails` with `Django` in your statement (and maybe could do the same with Node.js), and it reads the same. Guess it's just about being familiar with a mature ecosystem you already know, and then you can achieve results.

You could also replace it with Laravel, or any other framework. What I've found is that if you want to be productive, stick with what you know. Don't try to solve problems you don't/probably won't have.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#25
post #23

Rails is a great monolith framework, but a monolith will eventually reach its limits, due to size/complexity of the team or the task at hand. I think providing a better story around how to prepare for or handle that transition would definitely serve Rails a lot better in the long run. But, as long as the main target audience of Rails is Basecamp (a saas tool with 12 developers), I don't see it in the future.

The company I work at is transitioning from a rails monolith to many smaller rails micro services - it’s the best if both worlds.

lol good luck with that. the main thing that makes this work is that the company trying micro services most likely grew large and now has a big engineering team. It also moves slower than it used to due the stage it's in. In that case any architecture would work really...you have a huge team of engineers that moves slowly and can troubleshoot whatever issues arise. yay to micro services!

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#26

Rails needs more opinionated decision on frontend story. Just pick ReactJS instead ? Not a bad idea. Or VueJS ? Neither a bad choice. It's the main reason i don't choose Rails over a universal Node.js stack for the HTML rendering part.

Also, their opinion is to provide a JSON API by default, so you can hook in a JS frontend app later if you want. If you want it right from the start, you can create an api only rails project: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/api_app.html

Yeah, Rails for API is great choice. My concern is about the HTML rendering part.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#27

Rails needs more opinionated decision on frontend story. Just pick ReactJS instead ? Not a bad idea. Or VueJS ? Neither a bad choice. It's the main reason i don't choose Rails over a universal Node.js stack for the HTML rendering part.

Their opinion is coffeescript + turbolinks, which turn out to be the first two defaults developers change.

I mean something like Typescript with an opinionated library/framework for client-side part.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I replaced `rails` with `Django` in your statement (and maybe could do the same with Node.js), and it reads the same. Guess it's just about being familiar with a mature ecosystem you already know, and then you can achieve results.

You could also replace it with Laravel, or any other framework. What I've found is that if you want to be productive, stick with what you know. Don't try to solve problems you don't/probably won't have.

[deleted]

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#29

Popularity of a framework or paradigm seems largely driven by marketing and memes. With "Rails doesn't scale" as the almost-rhyme that sticks in people's minds, an entire tech cycle gets wasted on things that take significantly more developer effort. I've seen a Rails app handle Cyber Monday traffic for an ecommerce company just fine, and I've seen JVM-based apps crumple under a fraction of the load. Rails scales (se…

> Popularity of a framework or paradigm seems largely driven by marketing and memes.

I think a whole lot of developers choose technologies because they are popular at the moment for two reasons: they lack the technical knowledge and experience or maybe just confidence and/or they avoid some responsibility this way (since everyone is doing it).

Of course this is most acute in web development because it attracts younger developers.

Also the words performance and scalability attracts developers like moth to a flame.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#30
Build your app using whatever you're most comfortable with because in the end an existing product is better than no product. Will you enjoy spending an extra hour per day working with this framework over another? That's an hour more of progress.

Personally I think Spring Boot with Kotlin is a way better choice today for monoliths that transition well to micro services. But if you're already deep in the RoR world just go with that.

Running into stack or framework-related scaling problems is an honor and a huge accomplishment. Those are good problems and there are many ways to solve them, which will be extremely motivating at that point because people are actually using your thing.

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