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Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

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31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#31
post #29

I 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…

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n... so, scala

That's a misleading graph, you switched it to relative values, which is meaningless.

Here is the same graph with absolute values, which shows that Scala is completely invisible compared to the competition:

http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+pytho...

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#32
post #5

Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs. As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get bet…

> Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream.

For prototyping, maybe (and even that is arguable).

In practice, I see a lot more companies moving away from these frameworks toward JVM-based frameworks than the other way around.

These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#33
post #29

I 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…

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n... so, scala

+ ObjC. Amazing.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#34

I 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…

Django is already pretty good at this with plugins like Tastypie. At my current job our backend is Django + Tastypie and just provides a REST API to an Ext.js frontend.

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#35
post #23

I 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 i…

>we borrowed a technique from Meteor and made our views reactive

Do you have any links or resource to share on that style?

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#36

I 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...

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#38
I feel like this isn't asking the right question. The answers you're going to get are going to be a combination of a) people's perception of what Rails and Django can do and b) people's perception of what the future of the web.

So, let's first look at what Rails and Django can do. Ruby and Python are both slow languages compared to Java, Go, C, and even JavaScript (thanks to companies pouring a lot of work into it). However, computing power is increasing. In the Ruby and Rails world, there has been good work on JRuby, Puma, etc. to help concurrency and move away from the process-based concurrency model. I'm less familiar with Django here, but Python does have frameworks built for concurrency.

Now let's look at Node.js, Java, and Go. All three have good support for handling multiple connections within the same process (via. eventing, threading, and goroutines). Rather than taking up a process per connection, they just add a little bit of RAM overhead and get to stay in the same memory space with cheaper context switching (or none in an evented system). That deals well with long-running processes that would otherwise block a process, tie up RAM, etc.

So, Rails is improving its support for running in a threaded environment and while I don't know as much about Django, Python does have other options addressing this issue. But as it stands today, alternatives have a speed advantage and somewhat by-default operate in a better way for concurrency.

Now, if we're looking toward the future, what do we need this for? We don't need this for things like serving CRUD. If you're trying to keep lots of connections for a chat application waiting for a response, that can be better served by alternatives. However, it should be noted that 37signals does chat via Rails. When thinking about the future, you should think about what is happening in the application and how that affects things like context switching, RAM usage, etc. I don't want to predict the future. If you want to, think about how applications may work that would be better served by systems that don't rely on process-based concurrency.

As some unsolicited closing advice, I find that a lot of people spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over their tools. They want to pick the one set of tools that will last for eternity. Just as your laptop will age and be replaced, the code you write will. Obsessing over tools keeps many from doing anything. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. I'm guessing you see things you want to build - things you could improve upon. Don't worry about having to modify, extend, and do things differently in the future if it's keeping you from doing anything today. Tools are just that: tools. They aren't your product. They're meaningful. Using a better tool is more enjoyable and can create a better outcome. But don't obsess about it trying to guess the future and insulate yourself from future work. Build!

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#39
post #6

Note, I'm a complete newbie. I spent 12 months doing a Django job, and started a Rails job about ~4 months ago. Before that I followed frameworks but wasn't nearly as engaged. The impression I get, is that in general, these languages and frameworks will age, get boring, and eventually be something used because of legacy, the existing codebases. Is this bad? Of course not! It means there will always be a wealth of wel…

PHP does not feel "old and safe". It's probably not the right comparison point to Rails, which is more like CakePHP or Symfony, or the various frameworks influenced by Rails.

Having worked on Rails since 2005, I think the bigger problem is that it has become more complex, and harder to get started with, as the pendulum swings from eliminated.

One bigger change is probably as you state, that we will get away from frameworks whose primary responsibility is generating HTML, which affects all of these things similarly, and node.js would get caught up in the same thing.

Another big change is the pendulum swing from Object/Relational systems to Functional/BigData systems. This is a big mental shift for programmers trained in the Object-Oriented approach.

Re: Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

#40
post #32
post #5

Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. 5 years ago if you wanted to hire a Django developer it was pretty hard. It's still way harder to find Django developers compared to PHP devs. As a company, if you push yourself into a corner with newer tech like Node, Meteor, etc. you may come up against hiring issues. Not only that, but Rails and Django are also evolving with time so they too get bet…

> Rails and Django have moved from the obscure into the mainstream. For prototyping, maybe (and even that is arguable). In practice, I see a lot more companies moving away from these frameworks toward JVM-based frameworks than the other way around. These frameworks simply don't scale past the size of a small project.

Django and Rails both run on the JVM. Both have scaled to massive projects, even without the JVM.
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