Rails was released in 2003, and 2013 is almost over. So the question is "in 2 years, will Ruby on Rails still be popular and competitive" - yes. VERY much yes. In 10 years, we can debate that, but in 2016? No way!
Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#22Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails. Node.js is a joke, I see more and more people "get it". It sure serves a purpose, but the language not being for general purpose, the syntactical problems of JS and the single-trick concurrency model don't make it fit for true disruption. Meteor might be a contender for "next level" (currently it is build on Node i th…
Worse might be Better in the case of Node, though. It's also benefiting from a great package manager. NPM already has 2/3 as many packages as RubyGems and 20% more than PyPI.
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#23I think that Rails has a lot of life left because it be influenced by the new techniques that are being pioneered in other frameworks. In the same way that Rails inspired frameworks in other languages - new technologies like node and meteor can inspire Rails too.
For example, at aha.io we use Rails, and wanted to get the front-end performance of a Javascript-heavy app, but by taking advantage of what we know (which is writing ActiveRecord models, Rails controllers and ERB views). So we borrowed a technique from Meteor and made our views reactive - using Rails for the view rendering. That way we get the best of both worlds: the code only needs to be written once in Ruby, but the performance and reactivity is like an app that has a Javascript front-end.
This is just one example, but there lots of similar examples (think about the increasing use of functional programming styles). The incredibly rich ecosystem around Rails means that stuff just gets done faster - the ecosystem has done most of the work for you. Apart from Django, every other framework is still playing catchup.
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#24Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#25I think one notable thing to observe with any of these frameworks is that backends as REST APIs with a javascript heavy front end are becoming more common. Many of these frameworks won't disappear but I think adapt to the newer trends. Whether we like it or not java is still here and used, I don't see why rails and django won't be. The whole point of software is it evolves. These projects both have enough of a follow…
I worked on a project not long ago that used Rails to serve up purely JSON via a REST API and the front-end was all Ember and Coffeescript. (Coffeescript because an intern started prototyping part of the UI in it, and we all figured it'd be fun to learn. I'm not sold on it though.) We designed our JSON model differently than Ember Data expected, though, so we basically had to make our own Ruby GEMs and EmberData adap…
Exactly. I think a lot of web developers could easily find a transition to that model.
There's a lot of great libraries out there for this use case. Not surprised you had to do a bit of customizing though.
I think over time this will be come easier if not baked in to the frameworks themselves.
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#26Play doesn't belong in that list (it's really just a Java-version of the basic request/response cycle design that plagues Django and Rails, Scala or not). Django is sadly hampered by two fairly complex problems. The first, is their insistence on backwards compatibility and stability. While it's becoming obvious that the basic design of Django creates serious problems when moving away from the request/response cycle,…
Most the frameworks that abstracted request/response away, are now moving towards it. ASP.NET --> ASP.NET MVC for example.
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#27Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails. Node.js is a joke, I see more and more people "get it". It sure serves a purpose, but the language not being for general purpose, the syntactical problems of JS and the single-trick concurrency model don't make it fit for true disruption. Meteor might be a contender for "next level" (currently it is build on Node i th…
Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails.
In many ways, it is beyond Rails. For instance, it offers type-safe URLs and builds upon the Akka actor framework (allowing you to schedule asynchronous tasks, make reactive web applications, etc.).
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#28Play is not "beyond" Rails, it is merely an other community (Java/Scala) that catches up with Rails. Node.js is a joke, I see more and more people "get it". It sure serves a purpose, but the language not being for general purpose, the syntactical problems of JS and the single-trick concurrency model don't make it fit for true disruption. Meteor might be a contender for "next level" (currently it is build on Node i th…
I can second the thought about Yesod - in terms of how it feels it rather comparable with Rails, but is more concise with less boilerplate and stable in the sense that it's hard to accidentally break something; if your change compiles, then it generally works correctly and safely. Tracing /debugging can be a pain sometimes, though.
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#29I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n... I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now. Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own…
Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?
#30I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n... I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now. Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own…
+Java (dwarfs the others)
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...