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

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#111

Post by gumcreme » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 11:59 AM UTC

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…

> a asynchronous worker manager

something you don't need anymore with a modern stack

> an upload manager, and BI tool

standard stuff every other ecosystem has

> mature gem ecosystem

missing essentials like stable http/2 and full of unmaintained gems

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#112

Post by imtringued » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:00 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #92

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 I think the whole Java stack, with its myriad of metaprogramming silos, overreaching build pipelines, outdated HTTP libs and paradigms, absurd class loader configs and layers of module systems, unsound abstractions, and third-pa…

If you haven't used JSF then you haven't truly suffered yet. There are worse things in the Java ecosystem than Spring Boot.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#113

Post by imtringued » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:04 PM 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…

I have dynamically generated queries that span over 200 lines. Doing this without a query builder is pure madness. It doesn't matter how modern your language is, manually concatenating SQL shouldn't happen in 2019.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#114

Post by tannhaeuser » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:09 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #112

tannhaeuser wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pa…

If you haven't used JSF then you haven't truly suffered yet. There are worse things in the Java ecosystem than Spring Boot.

I know all too well ); Only three years ago I contracted for an insurance company for JSF, and worse, using portlets under Websfear. Well, it payed the bills.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#115

Post by gumcreme » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:11 PM UTC

While reading this thread, it feels like a flashback from 2009 and now, I remember what was my biggest gripe with Rails (next to all the bad parts mentioned here in this thread):

It is the culture.

I really find the Rails culture odd or tbh, I utterly dislike it. I mean if met a Go guy, he tells me all good with Go, it gets the job done but it has its warts, the same with Rust, node, React and so on. People of other stacks like their stack but it's not about life and death. Only Rails guys have these issues and would start a flamewar right on the street and try to evangelize, yell at me why Rails is (always) the way to go and imply that I am not just wrong but also an incompetent developer. There were so dogmatic and when reading such posts in 2019, they are still this way.

Edit: as expected I got downvoted and this is what I mean, they take this too serious, Rails is their religion, Rails locked them in. Downvoting doesn't bring your Rails back.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#116

Post by viraptor » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:11 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #53

As a former Rails developer, I figured it would be worth mentioning reasons I disagree. > Rails is not the fastest framework in the world… but I will argue that performance is the last thing you should worry about when you want to scale. > In my experience, NodeJS or projects written in other frameworks start to collapse architecturally after an alarmingly small amount of complexity is added to them. > More important…

> I can wake up one morning and just port my whole app to Postgres without changing a single line of code? That’s not bloody likely in the real world and we all know it.

What is likely though is that one day you'll want to use a gem providing feature X and because it's based on ActiveRecord, you can use it... whatever the backend is. There may be a few special cases where it really matters, but in general, instead of finding X-mysql-gem while you're using postgres, you'll find X-gem which uses ActiveRecord.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#117

Post by robenkleene » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:19 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #107

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.

Yet here we sit in entire thread that’s the perfect place to discuss these “better ways” of doing things and I'm seeing zero consensus about what those better ways might be. Are other people interpreting this thread differently?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#118

Post by gashaw » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:20 PM UTC

Ruby is great, Rails is good enough.

The main issue with Rails (it's the same with other frameworks) is that it discourages from doing proper design. The only design decision you make is where to put a piece of code, which is ridiculous ("Fat models, skinny controllers" is a bad design heuristic.)

Following Rails conventions works for small (simple) applications, but over time you arrive at a point where no one understands the whole thing. At this point someone suggests moving to microservices, and all hell breaks loose.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#119

Post by your-nanny » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:30 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #107

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.

better than postgresql? and what would that be?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#120

Post by mark_l_watson » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

Off topic, sorry, but reading this article made me realize how much I miss using the Ruby language. Except for maintaining a legacy web app that uses Sinatra (and takes close to zero time to maintain/devops) work and customer preferences have driven me to other languages. Ruby really is a pleasure to develop in.