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Moving on from Rails

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Re: Moving on from Rails

#21

Post by davidw »

xd wrote: post #12

"I was coming from PHP. PHP was shit then and is still shit now." I find it embarrassing that the community would vote up a story with comments like this. There is simply no need for it, and it shows nothing but a lack of articulation and outright immaturity. If you don't like PHP, fine, but slamming it with one word insults does nothing but insult the tens of thousands of developers out there that use PHP to solve r…

Also, "Bezos pulled a Hitler". I'm all for writing that, say, politicians who you don't happen to like are just like the Nazis, but this is taking trivializing of that regime just a bit too far.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#22

Post by fuzzix »

verroq wrote: post #16

So what web framework are we supposed to use now?

"So what web framework are we supposed to use now?"

Flippant answer: Whatever works

Pointed answer: I am paid to write RoR apps. When I need to get stuff done at home I use Perl, if it's for the web I recommend Dancer[1], which was inspired by (i.e. nicked from[2]) Sinatra[3].

I've found MVC to be a little bit too much architecture and scaffolding for many tasks.

edit: Not to say I don't want an architecture, but the routes and templating of Dancer are the essentials. Occasionally I will find myself missing the bloody lovely validations in Rails' ActiveRecord, but I am usually grateful for the light weight of the finished product and the fact that the entirety of it fits in my head when building with Dancer.

[1] http://perldancer.org/

[2] ;)

[3] http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Re: Moving on from Rails

#23

Post by hmans »

tl;dr - web development is changing, the frontend side of things is gaining significance, while the backend is moving to, well, the background.

No reason to be surprised there, right?

Re: Moving on from Rails

#24

Post by div »

It seems like the title is a bit poorly chosen.

The author talks about the importance of having a platform to cater to the multitude of devices and other apps out there, and that this means rails isn't the center of the universe anymore.

To me, this does not necessarily mean moving on from rails.

It does mean moving on from writing all code in rails.

There could be a fullfledged backbone.js app powering a responsive ui, and a distributed clojure jobqueue making sure messages are fanned out to their destined networks in the backend. However, there is still room in this picture for Rails as a router of sorts.

Rails still makes it easy to quickly build a solid REST api, and easy to delegate long-running jobs to a separate system, in this type of architecture, Rails would have roughly a third of the responsibility / code that it has in a Rails only architecture, but it's still a vital component.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#25

Post by xd »

emil0r wrote: post #15
xd wrote: post #12

"I was coming from PHP. PHP was shit then and is still shit now." I find it embarrassing that the community would vote up a story with comments like this. There is simply no need for it, and it shows nothing but a lack of articulation and outright immaturity. If you don't like PHP, fine, but slamming it with one word insults does nothing but insult the tens of thousands of developers out there that use PHP to solve r…

The worst language I've ever written commercial web sites in is called OOiS-Script. You can't release memory, there is no such thing as an array, functions doesn't exist, there is no scope, when you handle XML you have to strip all namespaces because it uses ':' as the indicator for trasversal, there is no XPath so you have to loop through the levels and with a mere 3000 files processed one after another you can run…

"but has some pretty fundamental flaws that still marks it as really bad."

What flaws are these?

"He did however, not say one thing about the developers that use PHP, so why would you slam him for that?"

I've spent well over a decade of my life developing solutions for real world problems with this "shit" language. I founded a business on this "shit" language 4 years ago and we are going from strength to strength. So yeah, I think I have every right to slam him for insulting me.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#26

Post by cvshepherd »

"From my experience, generating a good UI (V) takes orders of magnitude more than implementing M and C."

yeah, because picking the right font has always been way more of a task than domain modeling.. (yes, i know that ui / ux isn't a breeze, but this depiction is just insane.)

Re: Moving on from Rails

#27

Post by thomasfl »

TL;DR When web applications is written mainly in javascript and communicates with the server over json, what language is beeing used on the server becomes less important. As long as it's not php. ;-)

Re: Moving on from Rails

#28

Post by bphogan »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #9
bphogan wrote: post #4

This is less about moving on from Rails and more about moving on from building static pages from a database. Lots of web folks have been predicting this. I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views and do something pretty awesome. And then it becomes a question as to what Rails…

I'm not sure that is true for even the majority of cases. Remember that most of the web is not applications but simply pages of content server from a database.

But that stuff doesn't need Rails. At all. I'm talking about applications where people do something. The CMS problem is largely solved. Generate static pages from database content.

Combine that with bandwidth caps and you start looking at creative ways to make things work more efficiently. One of those ways is to simply stop sending things down the pipe. Like the repeated layout.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#29

Post by jiggy2011 »

bphogan wrote: post #28
jiggy2011 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that is true for even the majority of cases. Remember that most of the web is not applications but simply pages of content server from a database.

But that stuff doesn't need Rails. At all. I'm talking about applications where people do something. The CMS problem is largely solved. Generate static pages from database content. Combine that with bandwidth caps and you start looking at creative ways to make things work more efficiently. One of those ways is to simply stop sending things down the pipe. Like the repeated layout.

I wouldn't say the CMS problem is 'solved' exactly. Sure, you can install drupal or something but in the majority of cases I still end up building something with a web framework to server out mostly static content (i.e stuff that changes, but not on a second by second basis). Off the shelf CMS is often either underkill or overkill.

There are plenty of ways to make things more efficient without abandoning HTML altogether.

Re: Moving on from Rails

#30

Post by bphogan »

bad_user wrote: post #11
bphogan wrote: post #4

This is less about moving on from Rails and more about moving on from building static pages from a database. Lots of web folks have been predicting this. I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views and do something pretty awesome. And then it becomes a question as to what Rails…

I've been saying for about two years now that the days of serving entire HTML pages from the serverside are numbered. You'll keep saying that for another two or three years at least. With things like Backbone, I can bring up a Rails app without views Backbone-style development sucked when people did it with Microsoft's MFC, it sucked when people did it with Java's Swing and it sucks right now. At least for native gra…

There's so much here I don't even know where to start.

    At least for native graphical interfaces, you 
    have IDEs to help you out with bindings and all 
    that crap.
Yes, and we had slice and dice dreamweaver. But tons of Rails developers hand-coded their views. You're saying that because it's more work, people won't do it? You're probably right. Thankfully for the super lazy, there are Rails plugins for Backbone that generate a scaffold. And there are other JS frameworks out there besides Backbone. And as more folks work on these problems, maybe we'll get an even better solution. Instead of shaking my head going "it's hard" I'd rather dig in and see what I can do.

    youu don't have to build an entire Backbone layer,
    just for updating a small rectangle on your page.
You said not everyone is building "GMail". Not everyone is buildign CRUD apps anymore either. And for those of us with users that are seeing sites like Facebook and Foursquare and are demanding interactions where the page doesn't refresh, partials become an absolute nightmare. I have many that I work on. It's a mess.

I want to use a framework on the frontend for the same reason I want to use one on the backend... a shared codebase that more people than me understand, that offers some organization and guidelines to follow.

    Rails gives you the possibility of doing progressive
    enhancements, when you need them.
As an ccessibility proponent, I completely agree that Rails gives us the ability to do progressive enhancement. But it becomes a business question - what percentage uses the low-fi version of the site? Does every project require it? I'll be glad it's there, and doing a non-JS site is in my blood, but reality is that I don't think that's going to be the case in the future.

Thanks to modern screenreaders and a bit of proper coding, we can build apps that are accessible.

It's probably going to be a bit, but I don't want to wait around.

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