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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

#101

Post by imtringued »

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.

I prefer frameworks but sometimes there is a lack of fine grained escape hatches. Feature X covers 99% of the things I need. To get to 100% I have to stop using feature X and do everything myself. The solution to this problem is to make feature X more flexible, not to rip out the rest of the framework too.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#102

Post by rimliu »

ramblerman wrote: post #54
fouc wrote: post #9

All the standard web technologies are still relevant. MySQL & PostgreSQL are still relevant. Redis is still relevant. Ruby on Rails is still relevant. Javascript is still relevant.

Some of those are even more relevant these days. - JS has only grown in ubiquity and maturity of the language. - postgres also seems to be on a comeback now the honeymoon phase of nosql is over.

  > JS has only grown in ubiquity and maturity of the
  > language.
Well… if you say so. In my eyes a couple of sugarcoating patches do not make language mature. Standard library is still nowhere to be found.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#103

Post by gumcreme »

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 framed and this is what we all learned and moved to: There are new paradigms out that just make so much more sense and which are followed by the majority. When I read the original submission, I mean just the title, I was facepalming in my mind.

Rails had its time and there were reasons why people liked it. But when I see that people post that Rails is still great in 2019, I'd like to stress following issue because those people might confuse newcomers who have to decide which ecosystem they gonna join.

The problem is that being in a big or biggest and still growing ecosystem makes life much easier. Once an ecosystem is on the decline you get less good libs or libs are not actively maintained anymore and the best people who shape tech are also moving to new ecosystems. I don't want to bash Rails but just an example, I didn't see any proper http/2 support in Rails-land. Now, you could say who needs http/2 (it makes a huge difference btw). But the point is that it arrived in one of the biggest ecosystem just recently and not every lib there supports it out of the box. And that's just one of many examples. People repeat that Rails has so mature 'gems' but I don't see a lot of new stuff or a big variety, tech moved on but without Rails. Just accept it.

The real problem behind all these discussions and threads. Imagine there was a time, where Rails-guys were rare and Rails was the biggest thing. I had to pay such guys $200,000/yr (8yrs ago and not in the valley), not because they were outstanding. Actually, there were average, they were ok in Rails but missed a lot of other checkboxes (often devops or SQL). But the market demand forced us to pay such salaries. Rails brought them a good life and imagine demand was declining, so they had to get into other tech, start again at zero or smaller salaries OR went to forums and rant/try to convince people why Rails is so great.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#104

Post by pmontra »

louiskottmann wrote: post #83
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).

That's not good even if somebody is very proficient in the language. Custom projects not founded on some fairly common framework are always a nightmare. Business owners should forbid developers to go that route unless they have a permanent in house development team. And still, it should be the exception, not the rule.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#105

Post by lmm »

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.

A summary of my experience would be: libraries are good, frameworks are bad. (Indeed possibly the best "framework" I ever used was TurboGears which is very deliberately just a collection of dedicated libraries, all of which you can replace piecemeal as and when you need to).

Rails raised the bar for how little custom configuration should be necessary to do a simple, straightforward thing. But it turns out being a framework is not integral to that; modern libraries have been able to adopt the "opinionated" (which seems to be just a fancy term for having sensible defaults) approach of rails without having to grow into all-encompassing frameworks.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#106

Post by smt88 »

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.

> starting from scratch or from a minimal base is massively slower

This isn't the better alternative to frameworks.

The better alternative is using libraries and optionally a bootstrap code generator, which is not at all "starting from scratch".

The major difference is that you tell the libraries how to work together, rather than the framework telling you how to work.

Some frameworks become like a terrible DSL that you could never translate back into idiomatic code.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#107

Post by lmm »

fouc wrote: post #9

All the standard web technologies are still relevant. MySQL & PostgreSQL are still relevant. Redis is still relevant. Ruby on Rails is still relevant. Javascript is still relevant.

Disagree with all of those except Javascript (and that only as an execution layer). All of the things that those technologies promised, we now have better ways of achieving.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#108

Post by gumcreme »

nitrogen wrote: post #17

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…

> Rails scales

Your post is a bit misleading. Rails can scale but to get there is different than with other stacks. Some would say, it's much more challenging or complicated, some would call it just a PITA and if you really, really want to scale, like e.g. a porn site, Rails is the worst choice you could ever take. Or you would just completely rewrite it but what is then the motivation to take a framework? Maybe frameworks are wrong...?

However, I think dev productivity is more important since scaling is a requirement which is very often not needed and introducing it too early is just premature optimization.

Still, I dislike if people spread false information. Rails can scale to a certain (limited) degree but it never was easy, just the deployment then without Docker was a big mess (I didn't know one Rails guys who could deploy anything without Heroku).

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#109

Post by pmontra »

ramraj07 wrote: post #93
jypepin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 heada…

Coming from Rails, I spent some time with Django and Flask applications in the last few years. There are noticeable differences between the two of them but both are much lower level than Rails. The developer has more choices and can make more mistakes. Projects can look totally different. On the other side all Rails projects look pretty much the same and this make onboarding much simpler.

To answer your question: you're probably wasting customer's money (unless you're the customer) by implementing your custom components. You should use as many existing components as you can find: they are probably better engineered (dozens of teams at work vs one person - that included bug reports), better documented and maintained and will live longer. Then you have to adapt much like we adapt buying stock cloths, furniture, etc. But it's cheaper, faster to deliver and usually good enough.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#110

Post by lmm »

fyfy18 wrote: post #45
bjoernw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to support a legacy RoR monolith and being happy with it are 2 different things. How many of those companies are now supplementing the monolith with microservices in other stacks and are actively chopping up the monolith? I know at least 2 of those companies are doing just that.

Right, but that's just because those companies have grown to a certain point where it's hard to remain productive with a monolith. If you are starting to have scalability issues it makes sense to rewrite key hot code paths in a language faster than Ruby. That doesn't mean using Rails when they started out was the wrong choice though.

True as far as it goes, but does Rails offer a compelling advantage over higher-performance languages these days, even when starting out? Modern compiled languages have closed the expressiveness gap with Ruby a lot in the last decade or two. E.g. I find I'm just as productive in Scala as in Ruby - if anything more so - so I'd sooner work in Scala/Wicket from day 1 (for use cases where server-side rendering makes sense at all).

(I still have the problem of services growing too large and needing splitting up - though the better isolation of a typed language means that point comes later than it would in Ruby - but it's still nice to be able to split out a module and keep the existing logic implementation rather than having to reimplement entirely)

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