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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

#91

Post by pankajdoharey »

joelbluminator wrote: post #33
mavdi wrote: post #5

Every time I read an article about something still being relevant, it soon becomes irrelevant.

Naah Rails is here to stay - the momentum around the project is still huge and too many companies rely on it. Even if dhh did a Guido and left, there's a big army of contributors that would replace him. If I need to guess though, in 10 years dhh is still involved with Rails to some degree.

Staying power has less to do with relevance and more to do with legacy apps. There will always be some people working on any given technology. Be it Spring, Smalltalk, Common Lisp or ...some X technology. The question is, is it relevant? In an increasingly Multicore world where you try to extract more performance out of your CPU's Ruby may not cut it and by induction Rails. The future web devs would require writing better multithreaded code probably on the JVM. Clojure, Erlang or Go are the few awesome options that come to my mind.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#92

Post by tannhaeuser »

bjoernw wrote: post #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…

Really? I'm doing Java contract work for a living (thankfully not only Java) and, while it pays the bills, I'd use almost anything else (except .net which is just Java without the ecosystem). I think the whole Java stack, with its myriad of metaprogramming silos, overreaching build pipelines, outdated HTTP libs and paradigms, absurd class loader configs and layers of module systems, unsound abstractions, and third-party libs, many of which are starting to reach EOL, really stinks and sends you into a world of incidental complexity. It might not be so obvious if you're coding greenfield Spring "microservice" apps or, good forbid, Spring MVC apps in 2019, but believe me it'll hurt you down the road once you need to update your project to newer versions of third-party libs.

The problem with Spring isn't that it's badly developed (it isn't, and usually gives you good diagnostics, though your stack traces gets spoiled with Spring's ugly-as-sin reflection shite). The problem is that there are people who think Spring has a reason to exist in the first place. Spring Boot is a config framework on top of the Spring framework to make it bearable - that alone should tell you to stay away from it.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#93

Post by ramraj07 »

jypepin wrote: post #47
yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #8

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.

Agreed. Although I do Rails and have no experience with Django I know Django is the same. To my knowledge tho, I do believe those are the only 2 framework that offer so many plug-and-play, trustable component for everything, allowing you to be up and running so fast. I've built similarly large systems both with rails, flask and nodejs. Nodejs environment was definitely the worst, on every front, and I coming back to…

As someone who's built a few apps in flask that have gotten quite big (but still maintenable), I am curious to get your perspective on how big a difference Rails gives - I have explored ASP.net and Django as options before for projects and immediately (probably out of naivete) concluded that even for simple apps I'll have to start modding the behavior of the components sufficiently enough that it will give me a headache.

Hence I have generally stuck to using Flask and just quickly building a custom version of any component that doesn't directly cause any security issues. Thoughts? Am I wasting my time ?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#94

Post by Kalium »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #50
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…

I've found it kinda weird how Rack isn't emphasized in the Rails tutorials. It's really one of the crown jewels (heh) of the Ruby ecosystem. I suppose Rails wants to abstract away all the nitty gritty request based stuff but it's really powerful if you know how to use it.

You're absolutely right. Rack is incredibly powerful!

Might it be possible that there is a subtle catch in "if you know how to use it"? The more powerful a tool is, the more potent a temptation it can present to those who might understand what Rack can do but who could perhaps also stand to possess a greater degree of wisdom in considering what the right tool is. A small number of very experienced, wise, and deeply skilled developers can be trusted to use their tools well - yet this may not describe all possible scenarios.

Again, you're completely right. Rack is vastly powerful and immensely useful. Yet perhaps there might be good reasons for not quickly introducing people to all the glory and power of Rack.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#95

Post by bshimmin »

jypepin wrote: post #49
peteforde wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to work with ActiveAdmin on several consecutive projects, and I do not understand the draw. It's a fussy DSL that requires you work with your data in a way that feels very un-Rails. You basically have to approach building out your UX from the perspective of what the tool is designed to do. This seems a shame, in the context of Rails - a framework that's actually pretty great at getting out of the way in th…

I hate ActiveAdmin because of exactly what you say, but tbh it is indeed a very powerful tool and still allows you to very quickly spin up admin pages (to a certain limit, but this limit is pretty high). I yet have to find something similar.

Have you tried RailsAdmin? It does a great job of getting you over the line with the basics (though configuring it can be fussy and customising it is pretty miserable).

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#96

Post by thrownaway954 »

danmaz74 wrote: post #81
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.

"more error prone and less safe"

right there... if I could vote you up a thousand times, I would. I can place a bet that most home grown apps have no security measures against CSRF or XSS in place.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#97

Post by mottiden »

ck3g wrote: post #73
forty wrote: post #70

I have this joke that I noticed ruby/rails developers seems to use a lot of their extra time (which they get with the high productivity you seem to get with rail) talking about how great ruby and rails are and how efficient they are with it ^^

Take a look at how many non-rails developers spend their time proving that Ruby and Rails are dead.

So true

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#98

Post by sheeshkebab »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #96
danmaz74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"more error prone and less safe" right there... if I could vote you up a thousand times, I would. I can place a bet that most home grown apps have no security measures against CSRF or XSS in place.

Most modern apps use api/json based endpoints where csrf is not needed (cookies are no longer used for auth) and xss is massively simplified since html is rarely returned by backend.

In other words most web frameworks that help with rendering html on the server and writing forms to database are not needed either.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#99

Post by rimliu »

chvid wrote: post #78

I think for what it is - for its paradigm if you will - ruby on rails is an extremely well-designed platform. But I think things have moved on and what was back then seen as the right way (or just fresh new way) is now seen differently. For example - is it really "better" to say 7.even? rather than isEven(7)? (Strict OO vs multi-paradigm/functional programming). Or is the article's example of a data model migration r…

  > For example - is it really "better" to say 7.even? rather
  > than isEven(7)?
Yes. And that has nothing to do with rails, it's just the Ruby way.

  > Or is the article's example of a data model migration
  > really better than a series of alter table sql statements?
Yes. Migrations provide much more than just altering DB schema.

  > And why not go for a pure SPA rather than an 
  > AJAX-sprinkled compromise
I would love more people to ask themselves "do I really need SPA?" actually.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#100

Post by rimliu »

chvid wrote: post #80
chvid wrote: post #78

I think for what it is - for its paradigm if you will - ruby on rails is an extremely well-designed platform. But I think things have moved on and what was back then seen as the right way (or just fresh new way) is now seen differently. For example - is it really "better" to say 7.even? rather than isEven(7)? (Strict OO vs multi-paradigm/functional programming). Or is the article's example of a data model migration r…

And PS: Everything is relevant today if you are stuck with it. The question is if you would start a new project on it if you didn't already had a lot invested in it?

I am going to do exactly that. Why? Because of all alternatives I personally could use: PHP/Symfony, RoR or Node.js Ruby is the most elegant and pleasant language and Rails is best framework. Other my think differently, of course.
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