Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rails for everything

literallythevoid.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 250 posts

Re: Rails for everything

#111

Post by sroerick »

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’m working on a project in go right now, and I’m really, really enjoying it, but I really do not disagree with you. AI has helped me overcome those framework hurdles. The codebase feels extremely clean to me.

My gut still says rails for customer facing, Django for internal tooling or data work.

Re: Rails for everything

#112

Post by block_dagger »

schneems wrote: post #75
block_dagger wrote: post #13

As a single developer of an open source Rails project that has grown to serve ~120k MAU, I can attest to this article’s claims. One tidbit to add: ActiveStorage, which provides file attachment features, is another excellent piece of the Rails family. I’ve been using Dokku but looking forward to trying Kamal. Rails keeps getting better, and Ruby keeps getting faster.

If you like dokku, have you seen Cloud Native Buildpacks? You can build an OCI image from them as a first class feature https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks/blob/main/docs/ruby/REA...

Buildpacks look cool, but Dokku is perfect for single-server projects with its plugin system. It has one-command setup for Postgres and Redis, auto-backups to S3, built-in nginx reverse proxying, and an easy Let's Encrypt plugin. My current server has an uptime of 1,912 days (~5.3 years) with near 100% app availability. With reliability like that, I plan to stick with Dokku when I upgrade to a new server next month. For multi-server setups, Buildpacks with orchestration tools probably make more sense though.

Re: Rails for everything

#113

Post by sroerick »

rednafi wrote: post #86
sigzero wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Go was trying to capture that space really.

Go initially tried to capture the C/C++ space and failed miserably. Rob Pike lamented[^1] over that in a famous blog post. It got the most love from people coming from Python and Node. Then it became the defacto language for writing networking tools, and to this day, it holds that crown. Go is in an awkward spot—it’s not dethroning Python because it’s not as expressive, academics hate it, and it’s not as fast as Zig…

Not too familiar with Go but this makes sense to me. The standard libraries are really great for microservice type stuff. Things that, as a python guy, I would have reached to Flask for. Problem is, I never reached to Flask for much of anything.

I’m really having fun with Go these days, though

Re: Rails for everything

#114

Post by sroerick »

samtheprogram wrote: post #64
icameron wrote: post #61

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…

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.

Shot in the dark here, drupal dev?

Re: Rails for everything

#115

Post by hombre_fatal »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #77
dismalaf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby doesn't really have a learning curve... Maybe block syntax but that's super easy. Rails gives you way more structure than Django.

Ruby _definitely_ has a learning curve

Especially reading other people’s code.

Re: Rails for everything

#116

Post by sroerick »

rich_sasha wrote: post #12

As 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.

This is my go to line and nobody has challenged me on it thusfar:

If I was building a web ‘app’, consumer facing product, I’d reach for Rails. I think scaffolding up to ‘market ready’ seems easier in Rails. I say this having never really done this in production.

For internal tooling (using the admin panel), data based work, or geospatial work, stick to python

Re: Rails for everything

#117

Post by sroerick »

weaksauce wrote: post #9
ethagnawl wrote: post #6

Inbuilt authentication is a very welcome addition. I've been using Django instead of Rails for the last 4-5 years (for business reasons) and that was one of the features Django provided which, upon reflection, seems like table stakes for a modern web app. The other glaring omission being an inbuilt admin interface -- which may have been added after I moved on.

> The other glaring omission being an inbuilt admin interface -- which may have been added after I moved on. with scaffolding and other rails generators with custom templates is that really a big asset? might not look amazing out of the box but you can find css templates easy enough too. maybe they should make an admin generator but rails is king of crud and if you need it ootb you can use one of the many gems.

Django admin is particularly fantastic in the first 100 hours of a project.

I think it offers a lot of the same developer experience and convenience that the rails generators do, though obviously in a different way.

Re: Rails for everything

#118

Post by sroerick »

najarvg wrote: post #31
jilles wrote: post #14

If you replace the title with Django it still works. I’m doing the same as the author, but with Django.

Not hands on with Django (or other Python based frameworks) so pardon the basic question. How do the speed of the generated application compare with the speed of a generated rails application? I know the latter has made some strides recently..

I built a data app one time and one of my devs spent a lot of brain cycles trying to get data to process a little bit faster.

We were getting data through a partner who restricted our data access through an API, where we were limited to 100 records per call. Turns out discussing Spark vs Duck DB isn’t helpful if 99.9% of your software latency is from having to make 750,000 HTTP calls every weekend to run your BI pipeline. For the record, that API was a Rails app - but it was certainly not the fault of the framework in that scenario.

Point being, for web apps, I don’t think it matters unless you’re in the top 100 websites, and even then it probably doesn’t. Complaints about htmx efficiency always confused me for this reason. Your app isn’t slow because you rendered HTML instead of JSON.

Sorry to digress, others may know better than I do but this one is just my experience.

The only time I’ve run into computation speed bottlenecks in either was doing data analysis in Python, and you usually just bring in Python libraries that aren’t written in Python like polars or DuckDB. Sounds dumb, but it works pretty well.

Standard practice has always been for me that long running tasks get sent to a job queue anyways. So ideally nothing in the UI is dependent on something that is long running. But again, in my own work any long running tasks is almost always limited by network latency.

Re: Rails for everything

#119

Post by dismalaf »

delichon wrote: post #66
dismalaf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's always things to learn. Ruby does have enough features that you can take years to memorize things, sure. But to learn enough to make a program that does useful things doesn't take long. If you already know how to program in a different language, maybe a weekend at most.

Ruby was my first language and it didn't take me long (maybe a week of very part time tinkering) to learn how to make a basic 2D platformer game, or scrape the web for financial data and throw it into a database. The first time I made a Rails app it took maybe 30 minutes, to go from nothing to a basic CRUD app that does things and is online on Heroku.

In a professional context, I've heard of non Ruby devs getting up to speed pretty quickly. And as much as there might be to learn mastery, it's still a dynamic language that takes away most details for you (like managing memory) so you can definitely be useful far quicker than if you were to learn C, Rust, Haskell or shudders C++.

Re: Rails for everything

#120

Post by sroerick »

Kerrick wrote: post #7

Since Rails 8 I’ve even found myself using Rails + Sitepress over a static site generator. Kamal makes it really easy to run multiple lightweight sites on a cheap VPS writing even less configuration than Nginx, so it saves time up front. Plus, nearly every static site ends up with someone saying, “oh I wish I could ____, but it’s a static site.” Instead of needing to pick a client-side-only solution, use a third part…

> Kamal makes it really easy to run multiple lightweight sites on a cheap VPS writing even less configuration than Nginx, so it saves time up front.

Save me from my free tier GitHub pages / Netlify / SaaS hell.

This is the hottest tip in this thread imo

Post reply on HN