Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#81

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #36

I work on a Rails system. It's fine. Just like everything else is fine. I have problems, but I have problems with everything else too (sometimes different problems, but not always...). I think my main complaint about Rails is that it's pretty heavy weight. Lately we did a Sinatra app because we didn't really need anything that rails was giving us. Fairly quickly I realised that I didn't need anything that Sinatra was…

Having worked with many different languages and frameworks over the years, I have to disagree: when creating web applications, starting from scratch or from a minimal base is massively slower, more error prone and less safe than starting from a well developed and maintained framework, where so many of the things you're going to need have already been solved and battle tested.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#82

Post by royjacobs » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

cageface wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think Spring Boot with Kotlin is a way better choice today for monoliths that transition well to micro services. What do you use for an ORM in this case? Is there anything comparable to ActiveAdmin?

I recommend to not use an ORM. Really, with a modern language, an ORM is mostly redundant. If on Spring boot, simply use JDBCTemplate and TransactionTemplate to deal with raw SQL queries and transactionality. Get rid of all the annotation magic around this. Then you need a bare minimum of mapping code. Mostly this boils down to a single line of code to call the relevant constructors while you extract columns from you…

If you're going this way I would still recommend a library like jOOQ.

It gets out of the way and is very low-level, but it still allows you to build type-safe SQL instead of having to randomly concatenate strings in order to build your query.

This is especially useful if you have dynamic joins and things like that, which can get hairy fast if you're building them manually.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#83

Post by louiskottmann » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #36

I work on a Rails system. It's fine. Just like everything else is fine. I have problems, but I have problems with everything else too (sometimes different problems, but not always...). I think my main complaint about Rails is that it's pretty heavy weight. Lately we did a Sinatra app because we didn't really need anything that rails was giving us. Fairly quickly I realised that I didn't need anything that Sinatra was…

Well, to take on the other side of the coin:

Would you like to work on a custom-built project of someone else, decent-sized, in a language you grasp poorly?

Because that's what your "small, light system, out of large frameworks" will look like to someone who dabbles in ruby/rails and looks for a job (most of the force never reaches mastery, let alone wants to).

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#84

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:19 AM UTC

yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #8

rememberlenny wrote: post #2

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.

From my experience, it really wouldn't read the same with Node.js. Maybe some framework on top of Node could reach a similar level of productivity and maintainability, but for now we're far from that.

I suspect that the JS world being always in a state of flux doesn't help reaching that goal.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#85

Post by pankajdoharey » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:19 AM UTC

Mostly an opinion piece, A few points to Observe :

* According to the author NodeJS fails architecturally when small amounts of complexity is added to it.

=> Same applies to Rails aswell, anything beside a crud app and you start wondering which code goes where.

* Rails is Opinionated...

=> Great if it were 2006, In 2019 rest apis are a norm, and more Nodejs apps get enabled everyday have the same feature. Infact serverless apps to have the same features. In my view firebase or similar apps is the right way to go when you are booting your apps, and then scale or rewrite when you grow.

* Rails has a deep culture of code quality.

=> So does smalltalk, lisp and clojure. Infact ruby community has borrowed many ideas from both Smalltalk and Java communities.

* RSpec ..

=> Rspec isnt the original invention its based on JMock.

* Heroku, ActiveAdmin, Industry Proven ...

=> Straw-man arguments.

I am as opinionated as rails and in my opinion Rails isnt relevant in 2019, they are running out of ideas, the latest "innovation" in rails is an inbuilt Rich Text editor called Trix available as ActionText. Yes you read it correctly a rich text editor is the latest relevant innovation in a web framework. I think for most startups a great way would be to start with a serverless setup like Lambda or Firebase .... and just write the relevant front end bits in Javascript, Coffeescript, Clojurescript or Elm. When the app outgrows such services just write the enough parts of backend service as you need it.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#86

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:25 AM UTC

Meta: I read this on the tube, and wanted to write a comment when in the office. Came here, and it's well out of the first page, even if there were many additional upvotes. I really wonder who hates rails so much to flag an article about it, and why.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#87

Post by Supernaut » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:39 AM UTC

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #51

rapsey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 younge…

Young developers (as one myself), tend to be overly focused on what makes them attractive as a developer. Kinda like an overly insecure teenager. So they pounce on any framework or tech that makes them desirable to an employer. Rails isn't hot, so it won't get them a job so they won't learn it.

That's flat out wrong. As a Rails developer, I have a weekly stream of recruiters trying to get my attention.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#88

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:43 AM UTC

smartstakestime wrote: post #56

rails did the opposite of php , and I think its harder for it to pivot in its community. -php started with no framework , everyone just did super minimal strait to the db and template query stuff, very unorganized but you knew the underlying apis and tech because you were right up against them -rails started very ridged. separating programmers from the underlying apis and tech Now php devs had to create the ecosystem…

Also PHP benefited from Facebook's work and the commmunity actually cared about performance. Zend exists since the early days, now there there is the JIT migration going on.

On the other hand JRuby doesn't seem to be having that much adoption, and the new pseudo-JIT via C compilation doesn't seem to be the best way to improve it.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#89

Post by pankajdoharey » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:45 AM UTC

mping wrote: post #79

mping wrote: post #41

Rails is fine but didn't age well, specially the lack of strong functional programming support. Other nag is that it's hard to not do things the rails way - this monoculture reinforces the appearance that is fine because people looking to do something different just don't use rails. And when you "scale" rails is not really rails that scales as much as it is the architecture - it could be applied to other frameworks.…

Feel free to downvote, but please present counterarguments so everyone can learn.

Tons of Rails FanBoi's here! I use to be one of them.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#90

Post by pankajdoharey » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 9:50 AM UTC

Sure its relevant in 2019, which is why someone had to write "Why it is relevant", the last time i remember i read something similar about Spring Framework and why it is still relevant https://www.theserverside.com/tutorial/A-Spring-summary-The-...