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Returning to Rails in 2026

markround.com

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Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#91

Post by etothet »

louiskottmann wrote: post #35

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again. Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason. It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write. In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception ! Give it a try…

Over TWO decades! Rails has been around since 2004, making it just slightly younger than Django.

edit: Django was release in 2005

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#92

Post by dmix »

thedanbob wrote: post #90
BeefySwain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does batteries included somehow result in upgrading years old projects being a larger lift? I would think the opposite.

My experience has been the opposite, especially since Rails has included more batteries over the years. You need fewer non-Rails-default dependencies than ever, and the upgrade process has gotten easier every major version.

Rails is way more stable and mature these days. Keeping up to date is definitely easier. Probably 10x easier than a Node/JS project which will have far more churn.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#93

Post by neya »

jeppester wrote: post #84
neya wrote: post #11

One thing that is not stressed enough, is Rails enforces good code patterns early on. If you follow the docs, you will know where model code should be, helpers should be, controllers should be. After all, it is an MVC framework. However, modern day JS frameworks don't care about this at all. Most of them love flaunting about their raw performance numbers. Security? Fuck that. Not even basic form CSRF protection. A lo…

Give AdonisJS a try, it's pretty much the JS sibling of Laravel and RoR.

Thanks! Never heard of it, definitely will check it out.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#94

Post by neya »

dalemhurley wrote: post #43
neya wrote: post #11

One thing that is not stressed enough, is Rails enforces good code patterns early on. If you follow the docs, you will know where model code should be, helpers should be, controllers should be. After all, it is an MVC framework. However, modern day JS frameworks don't care about this at all. Most of them love flaunting about their raw performance numbers. Security? Fuck that. Not even basic form CSRF protection. A lo…

The difference between JS frameworks and RoR/Laravel is the ecosystem cohesion. RoR and Laravel ecosystems employ the RoR or Laravel way of doing things and everything works together very smoothly. JS solutions are loosely coupled, lots of good reasons to do so, but comes at a major complexity cost.

I agree. Opinionated frameworks are better in this regard.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#95

Post by peepee1982 »

dzonga wrote: post #88

Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

Serious question, as someone who started his professional developer career as a RoR developer in 2012: Isn't vibe-coding top for straight up CRUD?

I'm not trying to be glib. The thing that seemed magic to me at that time was all the scaffolding that Rails provided with a few simple commands, making it possible to quickly build something that let the user authenticate and enter and display data. Sure, Ruby itself and the culture around it back then was also great and will always have a place in my heart. But the whole convention-over-configuration and scaffolding thing, that was what I liked so much about it, and I never found that in any other language/framework combo in a way that felt as smooth.

But now, I use AI for scaffolding, and for my side-projects often never have to touch code.

So why would I choose something for a CRUD application that might give me headaches down the road, when there's a possibility that the app might morph into something less conventional, when I could use *any* language/framework that's not as rigid and have the scaffold be built by AI?

I get it if you enjoy actually writing code. But I don't quite get the benefits if the goal is to have something working quickly and be able to potentially build it out to something that is not served that well by RoR.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#96

Post by rco8786 »

dzonga wrote: post #88

Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

FWIW modern Rails is fairly magic-free also. They learned. With ActiveJob now part of the framework you get event queues/async processing and whatnot as part of the batteries.

I'm a fanboi, so I am biased, but Rails is still pretty great in 2026 for general business purposes.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#97

Post by dmix »

dzonga wrote: post #88

Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

If you're building a pure SaaS app then Rails is perfect. If you need SaaS + more complex backend services like coordinating tons of webhooks I'd choose Elixir. Documentation sites and light server apps I'd use Node.

Go and Rust fill in lots of gaps for more serious performance stuff.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#98

Post by sarchertech »

etothet wrote: post #91
louiskottmann wrote: post #35

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again. Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason. It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write. In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception ! Give it a try…

Over TWO decades! Rails has been around since 2004, making it just slightly younger than Django. edit: Django was release in 2005

Rails is definitely older than Django. Django wasn’t released publicly until 2005.

Django had private use before then, but rails was also in private use before it was released.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#99

Post by MrWiffles »

marceldegraaf wrote: post #71
mark_round wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!) Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

Not OP, but I made the move from Ruby/Rails to Elixir years ago, so I'll try to answer from my perspective. Elixir is a functional programming language based on the "BEAM", the Erlang VM. We'll get back to the BEAM in a moment, but first: the functional programming aspect. That definitely took getting used to. I remember being _very_ confused in the first few weeks. Not because of the syntax (Elixir is quite Ruby-esq…

Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#100

Post by techpression »

fpauser wrote: post #57
louiskottmann wrote: post #35

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again. Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason. It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write. In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception ! Give it a try…

rails = ruby = oo/mutable && slow && resource hungry

And for a lot of folks that just doesn’t matter. Paying 50 or 100 USD for a server per month won’t be the thing that breaks you.

Before you get to a scale where Rails become a problem you need to have a product that drives a pretty significant engagement, that’s where most fail.

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