Rails for everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Rails for everything

#101

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:25 AM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #48

kylecazar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general sentiment. But, ecosystem/popularity can matter (you didn't claim it doesn't, just saying). Specifically, it might be useful to know if a once very popular (dominant in some circles) framework is significantly less so. That downward trend might be relevant for someone, somewhere. "Dead" is still probably not the right word.

More accurately: “Established” versus “Trendy” technology. Maybe it’s stereotyping, but I strongly suspect users of Trendy technology are more likely to be vocal about it, including by answering surveys, and especially in online forums. I’m personally a PHP developer, one of the least Trendy technologies, and you’ll never see me loudly talking about it like a JavaScript developer. The internet, and frankly HN, would…

Depends on the frameworks more than the language. Ruby is dependent on Rails, Javascript on Node and the various front-end frameworks, and PHP on Wordpress and Laravel. Not to say that there isn't vanilla development happening in each of these, but that's not what drives adoption. (Especially when you use upstream dependencies like Docker pulls as metrics)

Re: Rails for everything

#102

Post by boredtofears » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:31 AM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #76

> if you follow (the Rails Guides) start to finish, you'll have a Rails app in production. And it isn't just hello world. Your app will have authentication, caching, rich text, continuous integration, and a database. That's a real application. These features are great for established apps like GitHub and Airbnb, but if you're making a tiny startup, and want to test ideas quickly, I wouldn't spend time on CI, caching,…

CI should speed your development up, not slow it down. It's definitely something you should add earlier to the project than later.

Re: Rails for everything

#103

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:32 AM UTC

rglover wrote: post #38

> Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year. I hope as an industry we can move away from this "___ is dead" talk. The OP shouldn't even need to say this. If something is being worked on (in any capacity) and has at least one user, it isn't "dead." "Is it dead" is groupthink questioning that leads to great ideas being swept under the rug because they're not perceived as pop…

Availability of resources and talent are very real concerns.

Re: Rails for everything

#104

Post by boredtofears » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:34 AM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #89

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree with your position on tests. I find that writing tests even for small applications saves me time. And that’s even in a language with a sophisticated type system. I’m also not sure how much time you imagine one spends on setting up CI. In my case it’s just one file with about 20 lines in it, and I usually just copy and paste it from previous projects.

> I’m also not sure how much time you imagine one spends on setting up CI. In my case it’s just one file with about 20 lines in it, and I usually just copy and paste it from previous projects. The problem is when it breaks due to some versioning issue or some other easy-in-hindsight problem that saps 3-6 hours of time that could otherwise have been spent talking to users and discovering/building real features. I star…

3-6 hours is nothing in terms of the money you will spend on development for even a modestly funded startup. You definitely don't need to be a healthcare or banking app to quickly reap the benefits of a robust dev/deploy cycle.

Re: Rails for everything

#105

Post by cjohnson318 » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

> There's a bit of hand waving around installing Ruby (which is still more difficult than it needs to be).

For real. I put together a simple Jekyll blog, and figuring out gems and this and that after not looking at Ruby for 15 years was a real slog. A lot of that was my fault for being out of the Ruby loop, and being unfamiliar with Jekyll, but I feel like the process could have gone a little more smoothly.

Anyway, this made me excited to try Ruby again.

Re: Rails for everything

#106

Post by adamtaylor_13 » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 5:00 AM UTC

koito17 wrote: post #57

rednafi wrote: post #47

Rails is awesome, and so is Django. I’ve built mission-critical apps in both and still do with Python. That said, I’d love to switch to Go for building large monoliths since it has a tighter type system and better concurrency constructs. The problem is, Go community has never really filled that gap. I love Go, but the whole "Go doesn’t need a Rails or Django" mindset is part of why it hasn’t taken off in this space.…

With tools like ogen[1], one can take a single OpenAPI document and generate server code with a static router, request/response validation, Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, and more out of the box. It can also generate clients and webhooks. Authentication is just declaring a SecurityScheme in the OpenAPI document then implementing a single function. The rest of the backend is just implementing a single inte…

Just reading this kinda makes the OP’s point. This isn’t simple, when compared to Rails. The simplicity-yet-capability of Rails is hard to match.

Re: Rails for everything

#107

Post by trevorhinesley » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

Ocha wrote: post #29

anthony_franco wrote: post #20

I agree with everything except for Kamal. I'm happy to have someone else handle the server side maintenance. Maybe once my service grows so huge that handling it myself makes sense moneywise, but starting off that way is overkill when there's such affordable alternatives.

I thought 2024 was very underwhelming for Rails - not really big advancements besides Kamal and Kamal should not have been part of rails to start with. If rails team wants to work on docker deployment tool, they can - just don’t call it rails feature

Genuinely, I don't understand this take. 2024 brought huge additions like Solid Cache, Solid Queue, and Solid Cable, the stable version of Strada (Hotwire Native) which completed the current vision for the Hotwire stack, in addition to Kamal (let's not sell that short, because whether you personally like it or not, it's a fairly robust tool for what it's meant for) and other niceties. Even if you don't like one/all of these, I don't understand seeing these as small advancements of the framework, particularly in a single year.

Re: Rails for everything

#108

Post by WuxiFingerHold » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 5:26 AM UTC

rednafi wrote: post #47

Rails is awesome, and so is Django. I’ve built mission-critical apps in both and still do with Python. That said, I’d love to switch to Go for building large monoliths since it has a tighter type system and better concurrency constructs. The problem is, Go community has never really filled that gap. I love Go, but the whole "Go doesn’t need a Rails or Django" mindset is part of why it hasn’t taken off in this space.…

I was looking for a mature, complete and powerful statically typed stack as well. ASP.NET was my clear answer (not Go or Rust).

There's a lot of noise coming from Microsoft to sell their new products (this year: Aspire.NET). But don't be mislead by this noise: .NET Core (C#, ASP.NET Minimal API or MVC, EF Core) is more batteries included and reliable than most other options. The only gripe I have is the need to get into the OOP and DI mindset ("create custom implementations of some abstract classes and put them into DI and the framework calls your implemented methods magically" kind of stuff). Takes some time, but not a big deal for experienced devs (and younger ones can learn faster anyway :-)).

Re: Rails for everything

#109

Post by rootedbox » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

With sqlite and docker.. rails apps are easy to share.. my last project is easy to install and use because of rails https://github.com/ThinkThinkAI/ThinkDB

# change directory_on_your_machine_for_think_db_storage docker run -d --name thinkdb -p 3000:3000 -v directory_on_your_machine_for_think_db_storage:/app/storage thinkthinkai/think_db:latest

TADA.. Rails is great.

Re: Rails for everything

#110

Post by adamtaylor_13 » Thu, Jan 02, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

tillcarlos wrote: post #33

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Litestack provides numerous benefits, but the largest is live replication to S3-compatible storage, which SQLite will not do by default.

Are you confusing it with Litestream, the backup solution? https://litestream.io What they meant was https://github.com/oldmoe/litestack which has a lot of things built on top of sqlite, like job queue and caches. Rails 8 now comes with most of them out of the box. My SaaS ran on litestack until rails 8 came out, then I switched without problems.

Ahh, yeah you’re right. My bad. Litestream was what I was thinking of.