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Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

matestack.io

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Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#71

Post by treis »

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…

The problem I have with Rails is that it's not a complete solution. You can use the generators to scaffold a bunch of stuff but those pages have no CSS and lack basic javascript like dynamically adding a row to a form.

I don't think they need to go all the way to something like react. But a souped up Turbolinks where you can also easily do partial rerendering of pages would be enormously helpful.

The barrier for entry into doing anything is still Rails + Bootstrap/Tailwind + webpack/yarn/npm. Which is a lot more than just whipping some stuff up in rails.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#72

Post by masa331 »

jonnymoe wrote: post #54
masa331 wrote: post #40

I don't know Matestack specifically but in general the problem of DSLs is that they can quickly turn into giant pain in the ass once you need to do something they aren't prepared for. And this has bitten me enough times already(ActiveAdmin, Thor,...). The other problem is that if you use this you only learn the specific DSL which isn't portable. But if you use and learn the basic technologies under it - HTML, CSS, an…

Core contributor here: I think you're right when talking about DSLs ONLY introdrucing a high level of abstraction. But Matestack's first layer only maps HTML tag rendering to Ruby method calls, which actually doesn't add any abstraction and thus gives you the same level of flexibility when implementing things. The advantage of doing things in pure Ruby (even without any abstraction layer) is simply that it's now poss…

Well i don't find plain HTML unreadable or messy. Same with JS. And i never experienced any productivity issues writing it.

As i'm thinking about it only DSL i find useful is Nokogiri's XML builder. That can save me some time sometimes.

Good luck with Matestack anyways. It's just not for me i think

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#73

Post by horsawlarway »

faitswulff wrote: post #69

This is cool, but I feel like this design has come up a few times before and hasn’t really caught on (Volt, Hyperstack). Why is that?

At least in my opinion, it's because this style of coding doesn't reduce the things you need to know at all.

The claim is you can write ruby everywhere, but the problem is you still have understand all of the html tags you're using.

So you haven't reduced the knowledge requirement from "HTML + Ruby" to just Ruby, you've increased it to "HTML + Ruby + This DSL"

Doubly so, in this case, since it seems to also be aiming to replace a subset of JS based updates as well, with the same problems.

---

Now - That doesn't mean the framework should be dismissed outright - It might very well be that adding this complexity brings a benefit that's entirely worth it.

Typescript is an example of that tradeoff, I'd say. It adds complexity, but the value it brings with that complexity pays for itself.

So I have no idea if this framework really delivers enough value to be worth it. My gut says no, but I haven't used it, and I'm not a huge ruby fan in the first place, so I'm the first to admit I'm a biased judge.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#74

Post by aerovistae »

vinceguidry wrote: post #64
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…

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.

I don't really see too many companies or projects using node on the back end. It's pretty hard to buy that node replaced rails. I see a lot more Java than anything else.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#75

Post by Existenceblinks »

vinceguidry wrote: post #64
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…

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.

The web becomes very narrow not only there are mostly Chromium based browsers, but also Node based backend technology for rendering HTML (in javascript). Very coupling tech.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#76

Post by grumple »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #68
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…

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.

Is it? It has an api mode and I’ve used it extensively for that at multiple workplaces and projects.

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#77

Post by ibraheemdev »

faitswulff wrote: post #69

This is cool, but I feel like this design has come up a few times before and hasn’t really caught on (Volt, Hyperstack). Why is that?

> There's a good group who've been working on making essentially a Ruby to JavaScript transpiler and I've heard a lot of the pitches for it and they're like, "But it's Ruby and like isn't that better?" And I'm like, "No, like JavaScript is great for what JavaScript does." I don't have this idea of just, like, there's the one approach to everything. The same thing, and that goes all the way back to thinking like SQL is not a bad language. Active Record has never taken the approach that like SQL is this sort of demon that needs to be exorcized. We've reduced the amount of SQL you need to write, on a regular basis, I don't write a lot of SQL, we used to write more because Active Record didn't do as much, but it's not from this perspective of like we have to eradicate it. We do the conceptual compression but, when I look at something like, Ruby to JavaScript transpiling, there's limited amounts of conceptual compression, 'cause you still have to understand the model of what it outputs into and like, it's just, it's not for me - David Heinemeier hansson

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#79

Post by pdoub »

jbverschoor wrote: post #22

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.

Thank you for the feedback!

As someone who's been involved with the project from the very beginning, this is immensly valuable to hear. Could you elaborate on how we could've gotten you to tell us? :)

(I get that GH issues is probably not the way to go, but wondering what other tool/channel would work? Also I think there'll be no silver bullet since it requires some energy & care to actually jump to action over a random project you find interesting and that will never be the case all the time, but then again this is basically what we need to work on to get people like you to try/use it!)

Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

#80

Post by cutler »

pmontra wrote: post #67
cutler wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do they find you?
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