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

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#131

Post by richjdsmith » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

gashaw wrote: post #118

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 under…

Adding a services directory with logic moved out from my models into POROs helped a lot for taming the mess.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#132

Post by monkeynotes » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #105

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.

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 fra…

Can you give an example of a collection of libraries that you would consider would compete with Rails?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#133

Post by richjdsmith » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

Smithalicious wrote: post #124

Heh, from the rise of Rails as the hot new thing to blog posts trying to justify its continued existence, it all went pretty fast.

Just curious, do you think hell.js with its node_modules filled with (sometimes) thousands of unmaintained or non-versioned dependencies will age any slower?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#134

Post by monkeynotes » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #106

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.

> 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 y…

> you tell the libraries how to work together

Doesn't this just become a bunch of decisions and team cognitive load you have to deal with?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#135

Post by sergiotapia » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

rapsey wrote: post #10

everdev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the down votes are for spouting nonsense instead of having a rational discussion about the article.

And for toxic attitude that ruined /r/programming

Let people say what they want to say online - what is this culture of wanting to shut down everything.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#136

Post by ausjke » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

These days for new projects you may just use flask/django depending on how complicated your application is. Python is top 3 language and its ecosystem is getting better daily, meanwhile it leaves many other scripting languages in the dust including ruby. Otherwise you can use a java framework or (maybe) node.js?

Node.js no longer has a good framework anymore, express is "out of date", it still can't do async/await and Express 5.0 is not actively developed. The MEAN stack is pretty much gone. I wish there is something in the javascript/backend/nodejs field that shines like Django/Flask as a framework.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#137

Post by Arubis » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

Rails is still fine and appropriately boring (in a good way). Its issues are well known by now, and it’s pleasant to work with for backend CRUD work.

What TFA really appears to be writing about is that doing backend work in nodejs is a subpar experience. I have little trouble believing that. A more interesting comparison would be to Django (my gut feeling is that Rails compares favorably here), Phoenix (a different set of choices about how opinionated to be on the data model, different base language with some significant and relevant advantages), and other frameworks that one would deliberately learn to replace Rails.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#138

Post by jypepin » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

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…

basically less available gem/packages for Flask, and when available less quality or less plug and play.

The difference is felt especially when doing basic stuff that most web app needs such as auth, routings, request/response parsing/building, etc.

Even for things like user authentication system with session management, etc. in Rails with Devise you add Devise to your gem file (1 loc) then run `rails generate devise:install` and you basically have an auth system with sessions, login, etc. We are talking a few minutes and boom, your app has a fully auth system.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#139

Post by cpursley » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

clessg wrote: post #34

This article reads to me as more of a "Rails vs Node.js" piece, which seems almost too easy—I would be interested in a more thorough comparison of Rails versus other frameworks. Here I will attempt a comparison, limited in length as this isn't a blog. :) My personal favorite up-and-coming framework (and admittedly, my favorite web framework overall) is Phoenix[1], written in Elixir[2], a functional programming langua…

Elixir and Phenoix absolutely blow away Ruby and Rails in terms of performance and capabilities, and in my opinion, is just as elegant and productive (José was part of the Rails core team, after all). I still appreciate Rails (it allowed me to enter the industry), but just don't see the point of starting a new project with it these days.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#140

Post by wrestlerman » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

I thought same in 2018 when I didn't use Phoenix. But after trying out Elixir and Phoenix, damn... Elixir and Phoenix give you so much, nice websockets, concurrency, fucking easy to read code with great docs.

I was a bit sceptical about the praise Elixir was getting, but after working with it for a while... I started noticing a lot of stuff that is lacking or abused in Ruby and Rails.