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Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

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Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#41
We[0] use Ruby without Rails - Sinatra for the most part.

I started the codebase over a decade ago now, and at the time Rails felt a little heavy (inline with your comments). That said, Rails does let you get started pretty quickly without needing much of anything else.

Rails has more magic. If you prefer less magic, then Sinatra is the way.

0: https://www.enchant.com

Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#43

Earlier 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…

> 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 to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern", so it needs to be pretty big to support those use cases. Not sure what do you mean by "most metrics". Framework supporting features is not sam…

yes is heavyweight, SQLite for example isn't , but is kind the point you want database to use multiple formats, have acid compliance, json support, parallelism, easy debuggability, scalability, fault tolerance. this are problems that you pay only little cost because 1 PostgreSQL database can scale to thousands or millions of users, and is more like a video editor you doesn't code directly in it, and data replication is difficult and expensive.

some people don't want have a server only for this and accept the drawbacks of not having a full database server, for example remoteok.

Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#44
I see a fair amount of companies writing internal services in sinatra/hanami/etc and using Rails for user-facing routes. The smaller frameworks are great but as soon as you hook up an ORM, user session management, conditional view rendering for different clients, background jobs, caches and all the rest then you often end up with a worse Rails. If you have a service that you know upfront will need not need that then the simpler frameworks are a much better choice.

Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#45

I 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 cl…

Please do this:

> We’ll be doing some deep dives into our new infrastructure in the future, including discussing how we built our own anycast network

(https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increa...)

Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#47
post #40

I 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 cl…

Today I learned Neocities uses Sinatra, thanks for sharing your point of view and for the work you're doing on Neocities!

Thanks! If you want to look at our embarrassingly bad code it's all here: https://github.com/neocities/neocities

(I'm not saying it's better than Rails, just that it's better than Rails for me.)

Re: Ask HN: Who’s using Ruby for web development, without Ruby on Rails?

#48

I 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 cl…

Was your Rails experience quite a while ago? Stuff like the method_missing matching a regex stuff that was common years ago has basically disappeared from common use, at least in my circle.

Rails 7 has been my favorite version since 3. Version 3 was probably the peak of metaprogramming and when basically anything you tried worked which was fun but really cowboy.

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