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I still use and love Django, and don't bother with that stuff. Django Rest Framework was another distraction.
If I'm making a typical website, all I'm using is a few PHP files, a single CSS file and maybe some JavaScript.
There are no build steps. No minification. No compilation. No frameworks.
I just can't understand even using Rails for web dev.
Am I the only one who still thinks any kind of build process does not belong in web development? If I'm making a typical website, all I'm using is a few PHP files, a single CSS file and maybe some JavaScript. There are no build steps. No minification. No compilation. No frameworks. I just can't understand even using Rails for web dev.
Some people are building real web applications, not PHP toys. I get not wanting to keep up with the latest JS insanity, but simple MVC frameworks are popular for a reason.
I think some people are so fixated with keeping up with the latest tech and prepare their project to scale infinitely that they have forgotten how good barebone setup is, especially with Rails. I get it, it's boring, unentertaining and might be understimulating to some. But it just works, Rails is truly batteries-included. Stop with the overengineering
I’m finally at the age where productivity is infinitely more important than anything else.
I sorely miss the sheer amount of utility that you can get from Rails out of the box for free compared to anything in the JS universe. Most JS devs don’t have the faintest idea how much they’re missing out on. Then again reinventing wheels is the JS way of life.
But also, that kind of power needs a degree of restraint. You can do those things, but that means that it's on your team to prevent that one bored dev or that one guy who's just joined from a company who did things a different way from their instictive needs to add in new frameworks without a damn good reason.
I sorely miss the sheer amount of utility that you can get from Rails out of the box for free compared to anything in the JS universe. Most JS devs don’t have the faintest idea how much they’re missing out on. Then again reinventing wheels is the JS way of life.
I sorely miss the sheer amount of utility that you can get from Rails out of the box for free compared to anything in the JS universe. Most JS devs don’t have the faintest idea how much they’re missing out on. Then again reinventing wheels is the JS way of life.
... even ten years ago, it felt pretty dated. Has Rails grown some framework-supported tooling for web apps yet, or is that the utility we're talking about?
> Then again reinventing wheels is the JS way of life.
There's some truth to this. The underlying notion is "how much computation do you do server-side vs. client-side," and because browsers don't run every possible language, the shortest path to client-side behavior is in JS. So there's a lot of wheel-reinvention in that sense.
(I do see the notion of writing the code once to run in either context wax and wane. boardgame.io is a JavaScript framework for writing turn-based stateful games; it uses a specific authorship pattern to run the core behavior library both server and client-side, so clients can responsively predict what will happen while the server steps through the rules and updates the game state).
The whole "web dev tooling fatigue" is so real.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question I think we should be asking: Why? Why are we replacing everything with React and a bunch of other libs on top of it? The front-end dev space feels like a cacophony of people all blurting out the same over-engineered stack. If your app is a few lists, a chart, and a form... Does it _reaaallly_ need React? 37signals is afterall running multiple successful products with Rails, and one of them is an email cl…
$1M ARR and 10k+ emails? Those are rookie numbers. There's nothing special about a rails app achieving that. You'd be surprised what kind of far worse junk than anything we're talking about can scale the same or better and is ergonomic to another type of dev. This is all just bikeshedding.
Of course Hey is still young... But I'm pretty sure you also know that they have Basecamp with 3M+ users. I mentioned Hey because I think it's a great example of sth more than lists/forms.
In my opinion Rails 8 + Intertia.js + React so much less "reinventing the wheel" (especially if you use shadcn components).