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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?

#61

Post by hk1337 »

cortesoft wrote: post #58
hk1337 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like Sinatra but a lot of the Rails improvements kind of took away some of the benefits of using Sinatra over Rails.

I believe it. I keep reading about Rails improvements but haven’t really tried it in anger in a long time. I started with Rails when migrations were just .sql files you wrote by hand. I switched to Sinatra mostly to use Sequel, because ActiveRecord at the time would do horrible queries unless you wrote them by hand. I know they have solved that issue, so I should try Rails again… but my Sequel muscle memory is pretty…

It's not just Sinatra. Devise, AFAIK, has been a staple for authentication and authorization and rails (or at least in blog posts it has) and in Rails 7 it seemed like it complicated things more than helped and I can do all the secure handling pretty easily in Rails.

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

#62

Post by thunderbong »

I've been on the Roda [0] and Sequel [1] framework for over 10 years now across various projects. Even after all these years, starting a project in this stack feels like a breath of fresh air even compared to the newer language/frameworks that jabe come out since.

Jeremy Evans is the creator and maintainer of both of these Ruby gems and is super helpful in resolving ask kinda of issues.

[0]: https://roda.jeremyevans.net/

[1]: https://sequel.jeremyevans.net/

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

#63

Post by hk1337 »

quest88 wrote: post #7

What 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…

> Also why is it a problem that something is "heavyweight"?

One issue I could think of when a framework dominates a language is that it could steer changes in that language that benefit itself more than the language.

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

#66

Post by chucke »

huimang wrote: post #9

There's Sinatra for more barebones things, but honestly, homegrown solutions always grow into a shittier version of Rails. You don't have to use all of the features Rails provides. As others have mentioned, for simple APIs Sinatra is fine.

> You don't have to use all of the features Rails provides.

You kind of do. First, you have to opt-out, not opt-in. And the opt-out path is less battle-tested, so there's a lot of skeletons to be found there. Use it at your own risk.

If you want the best modern example of a ruby framework which starts small (like sinatra) but allows you to opt into a wider feature-set (like rails), you should give roda a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fukis_VHl4

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

#68

Post by davidthewatson »

I worked with a four person startup tech team that shipped a production rails system in six months based on a python/flask/mongo prototype that I demoed in a week a decade ago that is still being used and sold today, though I'm not sure of its technical evolution.

I've built a few Sinatra/Flask systems since, so I'm definitely a fan of the virtue of simplicity, no matter the language.

The design mistake here is not applying lessons learned reading Danny Greenfeld's book (which I don't believe shipped before 2012) on Django and realizing the chapter on "vanilla Django" applies just as much to any system, like "vanilla Rails", because they are the same "stranger in a strange land" problems where the system as we know it becomes undocumented and unbounded by architectural style - a kind of McMansion Hell for system design.

The use of DSLs is complex territory. When in the hands of a master, amazing work can happen, but when too many DSLs are combined together, you wind up with exactly the opposite of what Greenfeld described in the chapter on vanilla Django, you wind up with byzantine Rails, because the boundaries that Alan Kay described decades earlier are not architectural. As with much software, there is no physics, real or implied, that applies to the phenomenological understanding of the system, the individual and social human scaling of brains that turns out to be a larger problem than computer hardware and software scaling.

There is a semantic asymptote, if you will, where the problem leaves the empirical world and becomes phenomenological - very difficult to share socially unless you are Kay, Knuth, or one of their contemporaries.

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

#69

Post by Alifatisk »

kyledrake wrote: post #18

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…

> I've also found ruby to be a really solid language for doing lower level glue tasks

This!!! I can't express this enough, Ruby is the sweet spot for gluing things togheter and rapid prototyping.

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

#70

Post by Alifatisk »

veesahni wrote: post #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

I wouldn't say there is anything "magical" if you follow Rails conventions

See https://richstone.io/why-do-we-call-it-ruby-and-rails-magic/

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