My manager called Rails passé this morning. It was in a conversation about upper management trying to get our team to start using a single page architecture and he called it a trend just like rails was a year ago. I disagree (on both fronts actually), but I'm have a hard time formulating a good argument. Can HN help me?
Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
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Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#2Well I think you need to articulate the business case. For example:
Using Rails will save us '$x' over time and use 'y' less engineers.
On the flip side, you do have to calculate the ramp up time of learning the technology.
To make a convincing argument, try to understand the other person's value system.
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#3What kind of company is it? Is it a tech company, services company or other?
That said, I believe he is a bit right in that Rails is no longer the new kid on the block, but you should read Jeff Atwood's post on Ruby (and maybe steal some arguments from him!):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html
"Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I'm thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing."
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#4I might say the same thing. What is passe or not is a matter of opinion. Doubt you can change your managers opinion.
Realistic options are
a) Deal with what the manager wants you to code in
b) Find a new job
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#5He is right.
Rails was part of the old paradigm where a webapp runs on the server and sends HTML pages to the client.
The new paradigm, which I would not call single page architecture for historical reasons, sends the app to the client in when they open a page, and then runs on the client and only calls back to the server to get/post data. And maybe load some additional code blocks. These apps are built in Javascript with underscore, backbone, angular, ember and related tools. They are also typically MVVM or MV(something other than C).
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#6It's just an irrelevant and unhelpful way to evaluate anything in software. Rails is no longer the height of fashion, but it's still a superbly productive way to develop web apps. There are newer options that optimise for different things and that might be a better choice in some cases, but they all bear the same foibles of immaturity that Rails had a few years ago. "Boring" is a complement to software, not a criticism - it implies that the software is sufficiently mature to just work.
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#7He is right. Rails was part of the old paradigm where a webapp runs on the server and sends HTML pages to the client. The new paradigm, which I would not call single page architecture for historical reasons, sends the app to the client in when they open a page, and then runs on the client and only calls back to the server to get/post data. And maybe load some additional code blocks. These apps are built in Javascript…
Rails is modular. It is possible, and a frequent use case to utilize portions to persist data, perform business logic for requests from code running in the web browser.
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#8 > My manager called Rails passé this morning [...]
> our team to start using a single page architecture
> a trend just like rails was a year ago.
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#9He is right. Rails was part of the old paradigm where a webapp runs on the server and sends HTML pages to the client. The new paradigm, which I would not call single page architecture for historical reasons, sends the app to the client in when they open a page, and then runs on the client and only calls back to the server to get/post data. And maybe load some additional code blocks. These apps are built in Javascript…
> Rails was part of the old paradigm
> where a webapp runs on the server
The developers of Rails::API should be informed about the new paradigm so that they stop wasting their time.
Re: Ask HN - My manager called Rails passé. Is he wrong?
#10What kind of company is it? Is it a tech company, services company or other? That said, I believe he is a bit right in that Rails is no longer the new kid on the block, but you should read Jeff Atwood's post on Ruby (and maybe steal some arguments from him!): http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html "Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool pe…
We're a decent sized tech company.
I have actually read that, but I had forgotten about it. Thanks for the reply and pointing me back to the article!