I believe this has been around for a while, and it reminds me:
I was very excited about what voltrb can become. Quick intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbFtIt7-ge8
Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#12Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…
I used Rails for a lot of projects starting ~10 years ago, but slowly gravitated towards a stack based on Sinatra (for a lean REST API), Middleman (static site generator), and webpack/react/etc - for mostly the reasons you describe.
In hindsight, I can't blame Rails for the direction it took; JavaScript's path (the language itself, as well as the tools) has been extremely volatile in that time. Rails is opinionated, which is part of what makes it great, but to be more opinionated on JS in the past probably would have been detrimental to the Rails community. I've felt the pain in my own work: every 2 weeks, it feels like my webpack/react/babel/etc toolchain and codebase need to be refactored because what was recently best-practice is now considered "legacy" and unsupported. When you embrace a specific set of technologies, you take on a certain amount of risk that those technologies will be deprecated, unsupported, or unpopular tomorrow.
I believe (hope is probably the better word) the JS landscape is getting more mature and stable, and it makes sense that the recent versions of Rails have incorporated more of what has become "standard" JS tooling. I'll always love Ruby, and even if I don't use Rails at the moment, I appreciate what Rails is doing and I directly benefit from the contributions of the Rails community.
More recently, I've been trying to learn some Elixir (those Phoenix LiveView demos look amazing), but not sure I'm ready to jump in 100%. Looks like matestack is essentially doing something similar with Ruby, so I'll be interested to see where it goes.
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm, At least in rails 6 it moved away from the asset pipeline to a webpacker thing. It always was opinionated, and imho for many applications the classic full-page-reload cycle is still good enough, or a js client-side app doesn't bring any benefits besides being the cool thing to do. The docs were a problem from the beginning, but that improved a little with the official guides. As someone who used it on and off s…
I certainly agree the classic full page reload approach is still completely relevant. It's more that most websites nowadays will employ a hybrid approach. They need a bit of both. Anything that isn't a static website is going to be using react or some other front end frameworks, and a lot of react involves asynchronous requests with REST APIs. But most rails resources focus exclusively on the one approach, with very…
I don't know the resources anymore, but Rails really embraced the REST (in it's opinionated way) approach with rails 3+. So any more or less up-to-date doc should indoctrinate the REST-style, especially for CRUD. You might need to make the transfer from the data is not coming from a form anymore, but some JS that sends JSON, but that is something a developer should be able to do...
And yeah, I also think a mix is what makes sense for most things, and there it can be anything from plain js/jquery through stimulusjs to react/vue.
Even though it sounds to me like I am trying to defend rails, this is not really what I am trying to do, just trying to show a little bit different perspective :-)
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.
Actually I'm not seeing many projects with a JavaScript backend. In my experience the number is one, and it was 2015. I mean, backends of projects I worked on or somebody offered to hire me to work on. It could be selection bias and yet they're asking me about Java, which I basically abandoned about 15 years ago, PHP, which I know since the beginning of it but only kind of toyed with, even C# which I can read as a fo…
Survey results of back-end JS: https://2019.stateofjs.com/back-end/ Only those who know about the annual State of JS survey.
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#15Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…
I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.
In my experience I’ve seen JS on the backend really only used for lambda functions, to run socketio for some chat-like feature or for pre-rendering React components.
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.
In my experience I’ve seen JS on the backend really only used for lambda functions, to run socketio for some chat-like feature or for pre-rendering React components.
I work for a Fortune 50 and my team’s product is JS frontend and backend. JS all the way down :)
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience I’ve seen JS on the backend really only used for lambda functions, to run socketio for some chat-like feature or for pre-rendering React components.
I work for a Fortune 50 and my team’s product is JS frontend and backend. JS all the way down :)
Might just be my area then (Berlin) I hardly see job ads for JS on the backend.
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#18Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…
> Ruby needs new blood infused into it.
yes, I strongly agree with this, specially when talking about Web tech.
I am programming in Ruby (and Rails) for over 12 years and I think I had the same feeling up until a couple of years ago that it become a stable system where I could move quickly and create new products but did not have so much newness.
But now I see at least two things which makes me love even more this ecosystem:
1. Stimulus JS along with StimulusRelfex https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/reflexes
2. ViewComponent https://viewcomponent.org
And now I discovered this Matestack.
I am excited because Ruby on Rails is a technology I know very well and I was (and still am) a little against moving to full SPA and adopting a JS framework for frontend. Somehow the SPA felt to me a little unstable in general, when compared with SSR. This unstable I think was mostly due to being very hard to debug real production issues.
It might be from the way debugging worked in the beginning not showing proper line of code where the JS error was, or it might be because of my own resistance to change.
But now with these new tools added to the Ruby eco-system I can make the web interface more responsive and in the same time feel that I only add stable components into an app.
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.
> I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling This is not true – PHP is still much faster when running on the server than NodeJS. JS has got much faster in the last 20 years, but in-browser execution has seen most of the speedup (as it's where most of the optimisation is focussed on).
What benchmarks are you basing this on?
From what I can find, in most benchmarks, Node.js is much faster than PHP - orders of magnitude in many cases [1]...
This is what I've always heard anyway, that the amount of R&D that has gone into engines like V8, the C++ under the hood and the I/O model make it so.
[1] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
Re: Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby
#20Love the idea of it, even if it's not for me. Ruby needs new blood infused into it. I realized recently that Rails started losing its popularity because it just didn't quite keep up as the web evolved. Where the framework and its community resources (guides/tutorials) should have started promoting REST APIs and out-of-the-box no-friction compatibility with modern tooling like npm/webpack/react/whatever, instead it st…
I think it's more that the massive engineering effort that's gone into improving JS has leapfrogged it over languages like Python, Ruby & PHP in terms of performance and tooling. And since you're stuck with JS on the frontend there are some significant advantages to using it on the backend as well. I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails but it's clear where the momentum is.
> I don't think any of the current JS frameworks are as comprehensive as Rails
To someone who is switching from the Node ecosystem to Django REST, this seems like an understatement.
I'd be happy to use server-side JS for certain microservices that needed its performance characteristics, or for prototyping in something like Firebase functions. But the mere thought of building a standard fully-featured web app in Node depresses me.