Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

frantic.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 189 posts

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#61

Post by faizshah »

thismodernlife wrote: post #32

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

Is there a good way to turn your rails app into a mobile app these days? I remember seeing something from turbolinks showing a way to make hybrid mobile apps using turbolinks.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#62

Post by erikrothoff »

awestroke wrote: post #57
erikrothoff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what part of Rails you didn’t find scalable? Our Rails frontend servers run on cheap VMs that are easily scaled horizontally.

Scaling horizontally is not cheap. A faster language needs fewer replicas.

Really? Our frontend servers handle 50 rps and cost $20 each and are nowhere near peak utilization. If anything ever needs scaling its the database. What level of traffic are you talking about?

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#63

Post by dwheeler »

ffdjjjffjj wrote: post #51
thismodernlife wrote: post #32

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

I’m also a big fan of rails, but I’ve experienced a lot of problems scaling it. A lot of the problems ultimately came down to the simple fact that Ruby is really, really slow. At a certain scale you end up forced to develop infrastructure on a different stack to keep up with the CPU load. I never ran into that so quickly when building similar systems with java, go, and C#. I wanna say something nice about rails too s…

Have you used fragment caching (in "Russian Doll" style)? In my experience, that's the key to making Rails applications fast. Ruby is slow, so there are definitely situations where it's not a good choice, but in many "basic applications" caching makes that irrelevant. Language speed is irrelevant when you don't run much code :-).

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#64

Post by rangoon626 »

rangoon626 wrote: post #35
rualca wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I Honest question: what leads you to believe that Ruby on Rails, or even Ruby, is the right tool for the right job? You didn't even mentioned the job, so why do you automatically assume Ruby is the right tool? Additionally, by ignoring popularity you're also ignoring availability of documentation and examples and mindshare. You're als…

I too have had experience after experience where every Ruby on Rails project in maintenance mode is a complete disaster. It seems like it’s great for quickly building things, but it is unmaintainable, unless you wrote the thing. I am very flexible otherwise, but Ruby on Rails is banned from any project I’m involved in.

To be clear, I would work on a ASP.NET WebForms project again before I ever touch another RoR project.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#65

Post by hu3 »

troughway wrote: post #47

I'm looking at Blazor/wasm nowadays and it's causing me an awful lot of nostalgia when I think back to the early days of Rails (if '08 can be called early days per-se), because of the shit show back then with various tech stacks and the grunt work required to get a site up with some DB backed data source and whatnot. And I feel like today we are back to some kind of a point of having to shoehorn FE/BE tech together u…

Server side Blazor is promissing to me. Simpler development by merging frontend and backend into one C# codebase but might not work well on unstable connections due to websockets. Some of my clients fall into this case.

I'm keeping a close eye on it. I also need to test how it scales with regards to handling traffic.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#66

Post by ricketycricket »

xwdv wrote: post #39
thismodernlife wrote: post #32

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

All you need is one weekend to really learn a useful amount of Node and React. You can’t spare it?

They work at Facebook on react native. I’m guessing they know react.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#67

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

I pretty much just start all of my projects, no matter how small, with Django. Working with microframeworks or serverless is great at first but as soon as you need any more of the typical features that a webapp requires then you start pulling in dependencies or re-implementing half of Django yourself anyway. First you just need a little url router to some basic views. OK that's great, anything can do that. Now you need to validate some forms. Now you need to manage some session cookies. Now you need to let users reset their passwords. Now you need to look at your data and maybe export a csv. It just goes on and on.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#68

Post by Dunedan »

neurostimulant wrote: post #53
alerighi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impossible to replicate the production environment I think was referred to impossible to replicate locally, on your machine. At my job I use AWS serverless services and I get a lot of frustration not being able to test and debug code offline. Having each time to upload some code to debug it is time consuming. Also you have to rely only on logs to debug, you obviously cannot use a debugger, and thus the solution i…

Ugh, I rewrote my serverless service for exactly these reasons. It felt magical the first time where you can deploy a service without spinning up a server so I put up with all these annoyances. But then docker gains popularity and suddenly there is no practical advantage in using serverless anymore, at least for me. I rewrote the service in django, packaged it as a docker image, then run it on any platform that can r…

What you do with CloudFlare Workers can be done on AWS with Lambda@Edge [1].

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-edge.htm...

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#69

Post by treis »

awestroke wrote: post #57
erikrothoff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what part of Rails you didn’t find scalable? Our Rails frontend servers run on cheap VMs that are easily scaled horizontally.

Scaling horizontally is not cheap. A faster language needs fewer replicas.

Compared with developer time servers are cheap. Even for a single developer being 10% quicker at development equates to dozens to a hundred servers.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#70

Post by sodapopcan »

kawsper wrote: post #60
sodapopcan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? I work on a very UI-heavy interactive app (it's a gantt chart) for work and therefore have been doing react daily for 1.5 years. React is probably making life a little easier here, and I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. If I didn't love my team so much I would be looking for a job working on a more classic web app in Rails. And when I profess my appreciation for Rails, I could just as easily be…

I know some Rails shops that are switching to Stimulus Reflex for some UI-heavy things, it works like Phoenix LiveViews, you can briefly see how CodeFund uses it for their interfaces here (40 seconds in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hA79vKE_E&feature=youtu.be...

I'm aware of Stimulus Reflex though never tried it out! :) I've been playing with LiveView a lot recently which is fantastic. I would love to switch to stimulus but we're pretty heavily bought into React at this point.
Post reply on HN