Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes
Thank you, so Rails would be a front runner choice for you when developing a new web application?
It depends. But yes, Rails is certainly "still relevant".
Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
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Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#12Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
No question, yes. I use quite a rich front end frameworks, but rails still shines for lots of use cases.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#13Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#14Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
It's not easy at all. I mean, if you are filling in the generated scaffolds, it may be easy. But when your coworkers start using all the nasty routing DSL tricks and the myriad of helpers, it stops being easy. Thing is, it's too big and rich for its own good, and let's not speak of the development practices it encourages.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#15Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
Rich front-end frameworks handles exactly that, the front-end. Rails is still an excellent choice for the back-end and serving up those APIs to those "rich front end frameworks."
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#16It's fascinating to watch the changing reception of a given framework. I think this says a lot about how software projects grow old. Since my career is only slightly older than Rails, it's been the framework that I've got to watch the most completely. I recall in 2005 and 2006 there was an intense joy in the tech industry, relating to Rails, and it seemed like Rails was going to sweep the industry. In retrospect, that joy was mostly because Rails offered something simpler than the heavyweight Java frameworks that had dominated the era before. In 2006 there was the big question, "Is it Rails we love, or the ideas in Rails?" That is, did we all need to start using Ruby, or could we copy these ideas in whatever language we preferred? And nowadays we know the answer to that question. In 2005 and 2006 Rails had a huge impact on the industry, but by now its good ideas have been fully absorbed by other tech communities.
For those who want to remember the mood of the times, circa 2005, Bruce Eckel did a great job of capturing it in his December 2005 essay "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts":
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312
He was lamenting/celebrating the sudden end of the hype around Java.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#17Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
I've been using Rails since 1.1 or so. It was the first framework I picked up, and the learning curve was steep for me (I didn't even know what a GET was at the time). It is much more involved now. Before there was no bundler, no asset pipeline or compiled assets of any kind. Javascript was an afterthought. There were no real choices to make.
Railscasts was active. This was huge. Repeating for emphasis. Railscasts was huge for me.
There were a few headscratchers along the way - RJS, components, maybe a few other oddities (I think turbolinks falls into this category), but they tend to get removed as time goes on if they don't work for a lot of people. The Rails team may get pretty enthusiastic about some weird stuff now and then, but they're also pretty good about reversing their mistakes. They seemed to have learned from the 2->3 transition hell as well. Upgrades are fairly painless now.
That said, it's still very much relevant. It's been polished to the point where you can really do a lot with very little work. There are solid, well maintained gems that do lots of common tasks (although there are a few things that are strangely missing from the community). The REST convention is very powerful, and the code is easy to follow.
I resisted the move towards complex js front end frameworks because I was tired of figuring out which one to learn. That hasn't changed. I abhor the pace of js framework development - I can't justify learning a lot of it from a business perspective. It is just too unstable. I have clients using Rails apps I wrote 7 years ago that are still very maintainable, and that is great.
When I need complex UI's I take a hybrid approach and have rails load miniature angular apps on a page by page basis. If the view is complex enough, I have it load up a single file angular app to handle that complexity - but only for that page. A 4 line helper loads the angular files automatically. Otherwise, it's all Rails. I've found this approach to be very flexible - it's able of delivering a very rich UI where needed without overcomplicating the good stuff that Rails provides for free.
Even if I were starting over today, I think Rails would be at or near the top of my list. I feel for folks picking it up now, though, as it is a little tougher than it used to be.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#18Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
I just started learning it this week and it isn't bad... However, there's quite a bit of setup, and it's a bit tricky at first.
Basically, a few years ago I thought it was easier to build my own framework in Golang, C, C++. I've also used PHP, Node and Flask from time to time. After doing all that, I had a pretty good understanding in how it all works, and can see the beauty in some of the way Rails works. I definitely think it'll keep growing and is worth learning if you're into web development.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#19Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
> and looks like there are better alternatives now. ...such as? It'd help to know what you consider to be "better alternatives" because it gives scope to what your priorities are. I've seen discussions in which people say, "Well now there's Sinatra"...which is fine, but that's more of an opinion about "Lightweight projects and systems are nicer" rather than "Sinatra is better than Rails". I used to use Rails all the…
Better alternatives could be one of NodeJS frameworks, Play in Scala and Dropwizard for Java. They could be better in the sense, that I can share a JS library between the API and Frontend or I can share a JVM library between the API/Infrastructure layer.
Re: Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released
#20Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
That is the problem with rails. It starts off easy when you are just making CRUDs and as the code grows bigger, you have to know a lot on how the framework works and that's where the learning curve hits you.