Glad to see Rails is looking better than ever! I've been supporting a few Rails web apps since the Rails 2.3 days -almost 12 years- and today's rails is quite different, like a fully evolved Pokémon. Thankfully the comprehensive Rails Upgrade Guides are solid and well documented. It was manageable to upgrade my apps one version at a time over the years without a major refactor. Rails embraces new developments in web tech, so it's never been backwards compatible, but at least their changes are well documented. ActiveStorage was a huge improvement over the 3rd party gems for file attachments, and came with cloud provider support. The toughest lift was the migration to Webpacker from Bundler for the javascript stuff, which we only finally did a couple years ago. But now it looks like that is all behind us with Import Maps support. I'm looking forward to upgrading these apps once again to 8.1 this year.
Rails for everything
61–70 of 250 posts
Re: Rails for everything
#62I've been building some apps with stacks lately that are supposed to be more modern and performant. Namely an app with Spring Boot and another with Micronaut. Both had a React frontend. It really made me appreciate Rails' omakase approach. Just having a form that shows validation errors from the backend and having something as simple as Rails' flash messages isn't solved by the frameworks themselves and requires you…
Spring boot has form validations pretty much out of the box, via validation annotations.
Re: Rails for everything
#63I’m curious on others thoughts on whether or not to use Devise? With the recent Rails updates, even in Rails 7, Devise didn’t seem that useful and seemed to over complicate the user authentication, registration, lost password experience and also seemed like I had to do a lot of work overriding their views to fit with my application. It seemed easier to not use Devise? It had its usefulness in earlier versions of Rail…
Some simpler alternatives to consider:
Rails 8 comes with a basic auth generator: https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/rails-8-introduces-a-basic-au...
There's also https://github.com/lazaronixon/authentication-zero that goes beyond that.
Re: Rails for everything
#64Glad to see Rails is looking better than ever! I've been supporting a few Rails web apps since the Rails 2.3 days -almost 12 years- and today's rails is quite different, like a fully evolved Pokémon. Thankfully the comprehensive Rails Upgrade Guides are solid and well documented. It was manageable to upgrade my apps one version at a time over the years without a major refactor. Rails embraces new developments in web…
I took a pay -loss- to maintain a Rails app for a client with a small budget, about 4 years ago on an outdated app using Ruby 2.3. Super happy with the decision. It’s too easy to add features or upgrade the app and I love working in the codebase.
Re: Rails for everything
#65There’s a thing here that seems to separate people like the article author from…well, from me. They just have a deep, deep affection for Ruby and Rails.
It makes everything great, and every new surprise is like discovering that your new special friend also knows how to juggle! And speaks Cantonese! How cool is that?? Oh, they’re afraid of spiders? How cute. But did you know they went to Ecuador in college?
There’s a honeymoon effect that just never stops, whereas for me it never started. I’m actually jealous.
Re: Rails for everything
#66As someone who doesn't do enough web dev to justify learning Ruby just for Rails: how does it compare to Django? That's the only batteries-included web backend framework I'm familiar with... Asking out or curiosity.
Ruby doesn't really have a learning curve... Maybe block syntax but that's super easy. Rails gives you way more structure than Django.
You may be overestimating the rest of us. It took me years to get fluent and I'm still learning after 12 years full time in Ruby. Sure you can learn the basic syntax in short order, but for us muggles, not the quirks of the standard libraries, let alone the whole ecosystem.
Re: Rails for everything
#67> Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year. Apparently that's one of the few things you can do well with a rails app. As evidenced by all of the rails apps stuck behind 3+ major versions because refactoring or upgrading without breaking everything is damn near impossible.
I rant about rails, often, but this is just a full on garbage comment. Your evidence is "all of the rails apps stuck"... where exactly? like... you have a listing of these? Or are you just making things up?
I've done a ton of rails upgrades in my career, they've all been easier than any other framework (except the current batch of js/ts frameworks that use codemods to update the majority of breaking changes).
DHH has been making some pretty wild changes with non-Ruby parts of Rails, but Rails 8 still fully supports sprockets, their asset pipeline introduced 15 years ago. All of the other asset pipeline alternatives are still supported, even though Rails introduced "Propshaft" as a replacement.
The only thing we've had trouble with upgrading has been when Rails added full support for read/write shards... it wasn't fully compatible with Aurora Serverless at launch, but we had wanted to migrate off that anyways.
So.... try adding some signal instead of just noise. Cite specific issues, rather than just try to ride a bandwagon.
Re: Rails for everything
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I agree. But Perl is dead…
Is it? https://jobs.perl.org/ I don't use it and you may not but it still has an active community and job listings. The last release was on December 20th [1]. This is what I'm talking about: it may not be popular in a "bleeding edge" sense, but it's still being used and developed. [1] https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/
uh, it's got a total of three jobs on there currently with two of them over a month old.
Re: Rails for everything
#69> Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year. Apparently that's one of the few things you can do well with a rails app. As evidenced by all of the rails apps stuck behind 3+ major versions because refactoring or upgrading without breaking everything is damn near impossible.
I upgraded a large Rails app from 3 to 5 using a flag ENV["RAILS_NEXT"] everywhere in my code and a few monkey-patch shims here and there (easy to do in Ruby.) We ran with the ENV var set in staging for 3 months before flipping it in prod, it was fine. Upgrades since version 5 have been much easier.
Re: Rails for everything
#70> Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year. Apparently that's one of the few things you can do well with a rails app. As evidenced by all of the rails apps stuck behind 3+ major versions because refactoring or upgrading without breaking everything is damn near impossible.
I manage a Redmine installation (a Rails-based issue tracking package that’s amazing). I’ve been upgrading it every year for close to ten years now and every upgrade has gone smoothly even though I know almost nothing about Rails or Ruby.