Ruby is pretty good for writing scripts to run in the terminal. For things where I need to do a bunch of string manipulations, I prefer it over something like creating a shell script.
Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#12What do you mean by "heavyweight"? Also why is it a problem that something is "heavyweight"? What problem are you trying to solve by asking these questions? What context is this question for? Are you curious how many people use a non-rails solutions for enterprise apps? Cloud apps? Personal projects? Apps you want users to pay for? A blog? I'd suggest stating what problem you'd like to solve by asking this question s…
> What do you mean by "heavyweight"? Rails latest release (7.0.4) have 386,970 lines of code in total, 310,779 of it being Ruby code. 3000 files in total. Just the `lib` directory of `activerecord` has 33,036 lines of code, across 369 files. By most metrics, RoR is pretty heavyweight, as their literal taglines are "Ruby on Rails scales from HELLO WORLD to IPO" and "A web-app framework that includes everything needed…
I don't know why something with many LOC is a problem. Why does OP care about LOC?
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#13We have a lot of internal APIs written using Sinatra. I first started writing my APIs using Sinatra about 10 years ago. I had started with Rails when it first came out around 2005, liked it, but then ran up against a lot of issues. Sinatra and the Sequel gem were amazing so I switched to that, since I didn’t need most of what Rails had. Now I just use those two out of habit. Rails is a LOT better now, but i still jus…
I really like Sinatra but a lot of the Rails improvements kind of took away some of the benefits of using Sinatra over Rails.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What do you mean by "heavyweight"? Rails latest release (7.0.4) have 386,970 lines of code in total, 310,779 of it being Ruby code. 3000 files in total. Just the `lib` directory of `activerecord` has 33,036 lines of code, across 369 files. By most metrics, RoR is pretty heavyweight, as their literal taglines are "Ruby on Rails scales from HELLO WORLD to IPO" and "A web-app framework that includes everything needed…
I don't know why something with many LOC is a problem. Why does OP care about LOC?
More code, more liability. If you can get away with achieving the same with less code, things tend to be harder to turn into big messy piles of code.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#15There aren’t many compelling reasons to choose ruby without rails, for a greenhorn project. unless you already have a big pool of devs who know and enjoy ruby, and/or a lot of home grown gems/libraries.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#16Stripe uses Ruby without Rails
Came to post this.
I would bet that Stripe is the large non-Rails Ruby user in the world?
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#17I’ve done some simple CGI stuff in Ruby before. Those are normally for ephemeral tasks tho, not anything intended to be used long term.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#18I like Ruby but I don't like Rails. No idea if this is better now but I would get weird exceptions that would be from metaprogramming goofiness that was really difficult to debug and find documentation for, and it uniquely bothers me when I can't figure out where errors are coming from in code (same critique of async/nodejs). The general heaviness also just didn't mesh well with my programming style, I like things cleaner and more simple.
The Neocities frontend is basically something much simpler built on top of Sinatra and I haven't regretted that decision at all. It's (relatively) clean and simple, and if I need to do something weird that doesn't conform to the paradigm (this happens a lot), it quickly gets out of my way. You can generally do anything you want with Rails, but in my experience that more frequently involves digging through a bunch of documentation and google searches to try to figure out how to get the framework out of my way.
I've also found ruby to be a really solid language for doing lower level glue tasks, for an unusual example I use it to glue a redis database to powerdns, which serves a lot of query requests, it's plenty fast and very reliable. I've never had to rip out ruby from something more performance-oriented and replace it with something "faster".
At the same time if I had a team of 10 people I was working with I might appreciate Rails keeping everybody on the same design structure so I there's not an endless battle over how it should be put together, but in my past experience this kind of just happens with Rails too.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#19What do you mean by "heavyweight"? Also why is it a problem that something is "heavyweight"? What problem are you trying to solve by asking these questions? What context is this question for? Are you curious how many people use a non-rails solutions for enterprise apps? Cloud apps? Personal projects? Apps you want users to pay for? A blog? I'd suggest stating what problem you'd like to solve by asking this question s…
If I were the person asking the question- I'd get frustrated by this answer. Nothing against you, the response is accurate, sufficient, and true, but woo I was subconsciously leaning forward and covering my mouth while reading.
Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why something with many LOC is a problem. Why does OP care about LOC?
More code, more liability. If you can get away with achieving the same with less code, things tend to be harder to turn into big messy piles of code.
I'm not a huge fan of rails but, you can generate apps that don't include active record example of all the flags you can pass to rails when initializing a projects.
--skip-git Skip git init, .gitignore, and .gitattributes
--skip-keeps Skip source control .keep files
--skip-action-mailer Skip Action Mailer files
--skip-action-mailbox Skip Action Mailbox gem
--skip-action-text Skip Action Text gem
--skip-active-record Skip Active Record files
--skip-active-job Skip Active Job
--skip-active-storage Skip Active Storage files
--skip-action-cable Skip Action Cable files
--skip-asset-pipeline Skip Asset Pipeline
--skip-javascript Skip JavaScript files
--skip-hotwire Skip Hotwire integration
--skip-jbuilder Skip jbuilder gem
--skip-test Skip test files
--skip-system-test Skip system test files
--skip-bootsnap Skip bootsnap gem