Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#21

Post by dnautics » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

dperfect wrote: post #12

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

I used Rails for a lot of projects starting ~10 years ago, but slowly gravitated towards a stack based on Sinatra (for a lean REST API), Middleman (static site generator), and webpack/react/etc - for mostly the reasons you describe. In hindsight, I can't blame Rails for the direction it took; JavaScript's path (the language itself, as well as the tools) has been extremely volatile in that time. Rails is opinionated,…

If you want a sinatra equivalent for elixir, you can use plug.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#22

Post by jbverschoor » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:05 AM UTC

Looked into it before. Love the concept, and looks very neat to use.

However, I was unable to find documentation about how it works underneath. I also would like to see some info about how to integrate with other javascript libraries.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#23

Post by hestefisk » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

Is the Ruby code compiled into JS?

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#24

Post by arcturus17 » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:15 AM UTC

gls2ro wrote: post #18

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

> Ruby needs new blood infused into it. yes, I strongly agree with this, specially when talking about Web tech. I am programming in Ruby (and Rails) for over 12 years and I think I had the same feeling up until a couple of years ago that it become a stable system where I could move quickly and create new products but did not have so much newness. But now I see at least two things which makes me love even more this ec…

Can't tell what your SPA experience has been, but in my experience React with a standard webpack configuration such as what you get with create-react-app provides an extremely detailed trace. Never felt like I've lost more time than I should there.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#25

Post by arcturus17 » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:21 AM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #5

cageface wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.

Actually I'm not seeing many projects with a JavaScript backend. In my experience the number is one, and it was 2015. I mean, backends of projects I worked on or somebody offered to hire me to work on. It could be selection bias and yet they're asking me about Java, which I basically abandoned about 15 years ago, PHP, which I know since the beginning of it but only kind of toyed with, even C# which I can read as a fo…

I read an article from Thoughtworks where they said they use NestJS in some production apps that benefitted from Node's performance characteristics. In the same article however they were critical of the trend of shoe-horning server-side JS into projects where more classical languages/frameworks would be a better fit.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#26

Post by rolae » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

hestefisk wrote: post #23

Is the Ruby code compiled into JS?

No, there are three layers on how to use matestack. Without reactivity, it just creates pure HTML. If you use reactive functions like :onclick, :toggle, :async, you basically configure/fill VueJS components provided by matestack. On the third layer you can write your own VueJS components in Javascript, but still use the matestack DSL to then use/configure it.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#27

Post by rektide » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:31 AM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

alas for rails, a very very large percent of it's simplicity & adoptability were derived from it being so so so so server side based. useful for making an easy to use opinionated framework.

but ultimately, expectations moved on. rails has continued finding it's way, trying to find a rails way to do things, but without that original simplicity, it's not nearly as compelling a sell.

no one's done a particularly good job keeping a more server-side biased model. thicker clients keep winning & winning. I don't think it has to be this way, but it's going to take some soul searching & big up front bold vision & architecture to muster to the challenge & create a more balanced client - server relationship. not a ton of obvious winners hereabouts! but I believe!

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#28

Post by rektide » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #3

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.

> i think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling.

huge js lover here but I don't think this is true. I think the basic obvious progression is that the client side has shouldered more & more responsibility, that architectures have shifted away from being server side, & few folk have figured out how to make the server relevant. it does a tiny bit of business logic & mostly just crud operations on data. trying to do like we did, keep rendering & a lot of the client state on the server- it wasn't helpful, was a bad way of doing things. these choices of languages became irrelevant as the client side rose in prevalence, capabilities, & yes too, somewhat, performance, but mainly I chalk it up to a long long struggle to find suitable architectures. I don't think this is fair accompli, that it's all decided, but server side needs to radically change it's game if it wants to become relevant again.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#29

Post by Lio » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

I’m actually quite bullish about Rails for the fitst time in a while due to StimulusRelex[1].

It’s a similar approach to Elixir’s Liveview and provides reactive, diff’d partial updates streamed over a websocket.

This seems a very “now” approach to building webapps.

1. https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#30

Post by rolae » Sun, Nov 22, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #2

Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…

Rails has very much embraced webpack and different ways to build SPA on it, with providing an API only mode and easy install webpacker install commands. Maybe for an oppinionated framework it now offers too many ways to do the frontend.

But more importantly, Rails is still insanely productive to work with. And with gems like stimulus_reflex and matestack you can get reactivity easily without having the complexity of full blown SPAs.