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Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

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Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#61
post #59
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That hardly sounds representative of the Node.js adoption curve. Could you elaborate on your typical client profile? Are you a solo freelancer, maybe attracting clients with legacy codebases? Location?

Freelancer, Milano, Italy. They reach to me either for taking over existing projects or to start new ones. Of course it can be selection bias but it extends to the other developers I'm in contact with.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#62
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.

This is a little bit premature of me to posit however I have a good feeling about tech like Blazor. In particular Blazor offers two interesting approaches (“hosting models”): 1) a websocket-based HTML sync layer, basically shipping over the smallest amounts of render state from the back-end. This is as close as you get to having, essentially, a server-side rendered page that is then updated in real time. 2) a wasm ba…

Blazor currently has to haul its runtime over the wire before it can do anything so a non-starter for anything performance-sensitive.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#63
post #61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hardly sounds representative of the Node.js adoption curve. Could you elaborate on your typical client profile? Are you a solo freelancer, maybe attracting clients with legacy codebases? Location?

Freelancer, Milano, Italy. They reach to me either for taking over existing projects or to start new ones. Of course it can be selection bias but it extends to the other developers I'm in contact with.

Just searched Milan on https://it.indeed.com - Node.js 123, Django 26, Rails 11, ASP.Net 133, Laravel 67. As Node is a web technology comparing it with general purpose languages such as Java and C# is apples to oranges.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#64

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…

Christ. It did keep up. Every new rails release just makes it better and better. Rails isn’t popular anymore because people followed the swan song of language isomorphism overlooking JavaScript’s deficiencies. NodeJS improved by... adding Rails features.

It’s amazing that people think there’s more to this story. It was Node that couldn’t keep up with Rails. No one cares cuz they didn’t want to learn ruby.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#65
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might just be my area then (Berlin) I hardly see job ads for JS on the backend.

Wow we must be in separate Berlins because I see tons of JS backends. My impression is Javascript & Python are competing for most popular backend.

Quite possible that I live in my bubble! I see a lot of React & React Native but hadn't seen so much on the backend.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#66
post #61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hardly sounds representative of the Node.js adoption curve. Could you elaborate on your typical client profile? Are you a solo freelancer, maybe attracting clients with legacy codebases? Location?

Freelancer, Milano, Italy. They reach to me either for taking over existing projects or to start new ones. Of course it can be selection bias but it extends to the other developers I'm in contact with.

What's your typical way of sourcing clients?

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#67
post #66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freelancer, Milano, Italy. They reach to me either for taking over existing projects or to start new ones. Of course it can be selection bias but it extends to the other developers I'm in contact with.

What's your typical way of sourcing clients?

Almost always word of mouth. They start looking for somebody experienced in what they want to do (development and/or software architecture) and some eventually find me.

So selection bias is very possible.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#68

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…

Well, realistically, rails is a bad choice for a json rest api. As for everything else you said, it is doing that as far as i'm aware. Webpacker it's a thing.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#70
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You can try out Turbolinks, the Rails equivalent for LiveView.

No, liveview does everything on the server, including holding the frontend state, which is why it's so powerful.

Liveview can't be reproduced in ruby, currently. It might be a possibility once Ractor are there, but even in that case Ruby doesn't have the performance optimizations of elixir templates (and given how liveview works, those are needed). It might never be possible, or it might be possible in many years.

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