Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

devbrett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 264 posts

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#161

Post by freehunter »

chvid wrote: post #152
freehunter wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would love more people to ask themselves "do I really need SPA?" actually. And I'd love if people asked "is anyone actually doing SPA" beyond what TurboLinks + a Vue frontend on a Rails backend would get you.

My point is rather if you are doing that (a hybrid app) wouldn’t doing a full spa actually be simpler? And allow you to use a less complex framework / a framework which doesn’t have to support that legacy.

You're going to need to define a "full SPA". Every SPA needs a backend, and Rails is as good as any. In fact, Rails + Vue is, by any definition, a "full SPA" as Vue is a SPA front-end framework and SPA only refers to the front-end design. You can launch Rails in API-only mode so there is no "legacy" anything, just a backend framework that has all the benefits of Rails while still giving you the SPA front-end you're looking for.

I wouldn't even call it a hybrid, nor would I say it's any more complex than anything else. Every SPA needs a backend, and Rails is as good as any.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#162

Post by rapsey »

sergiotapia wrote: post #135
rapsey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for toxic attitude that ruined /r/programming

Let people say what they want to say online - what is this culture of wanting to shut down everything.

Shouting and insulting people is no way to have a discussion. Without moderation or some other mechanism this is what online communities devolve into and it destroys them.

/r/programming used to have lots of great discussion. Now it's mostly a deserted wasteland.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#163

Post by toasterlovin »

lmm wrote: post #105
danmaz74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked with many different languages and frameworks over the years, I have to disagree: when creating web applications, starting from scratch or from a minimal base is massively slower, more error prone and less safe than starting from a well developed and maintained framework, where so many of the things you're going to need have already been solved and battle tested.

A summary of my experience would be: libraries are good, frameworks are bad. (Indeed possibly the best "framework" I ever used was TurboGears which is very deliberately just a collection of dedicated libraries, all of which you can replace piecemeal as and when you need to). Rails raised the bar for how little custom configuration should be necessary to do a simple, straightforward thing. But it turns out being a fra…

You know that Rails is a collection of libraries that can pretty much all be replaced with the alternative of your choice, right?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#164

Post by notafrog »

richjdsmith wrote: post #131
gashaw wrote: post #118

Ruby is great, Rails is good enough. The main issue with Rails (it's the same with other frameworks) is that it discourages from doing proper design. The only design decision you make is where to put a piece of code, which is ridiculous ("Fat models, skinny controllers" is a bad design heuristic.) Following Rails conventions works for small (simple) applications, but over time you arrive at a point where no one under…

Adding a services directory with logic moved out from my models into POROs helped a lot for taming the mess.

Yep. That has been my experience with Django as well.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#165

Post by wrestlerman »

cutler wrote: post #159
wrestlerman wrote: post #140

I thought same in 2018 when I didn't use Phoenix. But after trying out Elixir and Phoenix, damn... Elixir and Phoenix give you so much, nice websockets, concurrency, fucking easy to read code with great docs. I was a bit sceptical about the praise Elixir was getting, but after working with it for a while... I started noticing a lot of stuff that is lacking or abused in Ruby and Rails.

Elixir looks great until you look at modulecounts.com where Erlang/Elixir libs total a mere 7900. Compared with Ruby's 150900 gems that's a lot more code you're going to have to write surely?

That's a very valid concern. My personal opinion: Yes, the package system is pretty small. That's why it depends what kind of project you are gonna write and how much time you have. Ruby has a lot of gems, but many of them are buggy and deprecated... Proof: https://github.com/rubysherpas/paranoia

I think that Elixir is gonna catch up. If you write a project where you need to use a lot of external libraries probably Ruby is better. If you don't need to rely on the external dependencies too much and you want to/have to write your own code(libs), imo, Elixir is a better option. It also depends on a project, lots of external api calls, webhooks, real time chatrooms, etc. I think Elixir is gonna be a better option.

One thing more, because Elixir's code is much easier to deal with, it's easier to fork and fix deprecated lib than in Ruby(Rails).

It's just my opinion.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#166

Post by jakelazaroff »

mikekchar wrote: post #36

I work on a Rails system. It's fine. Just like everything else is fine. I have problems, but I have problems with everything else too (sometimes different problems, but not always...). I think my main complaint about Rails is that it's pretty heavy weight. Lately we did a Sinatra app because we didn't really need anything that rails was giving us. Fairly quickly I realised that I didn't need anything that Sinatra was…

> I think especially after your app gets to be a certain size, you are either writing your own framework, or fighting with the framework you chose at the beginning.

I agree with this, but I end up at the opposite conclusion. This post about JavaScript frameworks [1] by Tom Dale puts it nicely:

> I have heard from many developers who have told me that they accepted the argument that vanilla JavaScript or microlibraries would let them write leaner, meaner, faster apps. After a year or two, however, what they found themselves with was a slower, bigger, less documented and unmaintained in-house framework with no community. As apps grow, you tend to need the abstractions that a framework offers. Either you or the community write the code.

[1] https://tomdale.net/2015/11/javascript-frameworks-and-mobile...

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#167

Post by StevePerkins »

What is the Ruby community like in 2019?

I've spent the past 20 years primarily working on JVM-based languages. Being told for about 19 of those years that my boring verbose tech stack stack is obsolete, and going away from the business world any day now.

Most recently, that voice comes mainly from the Node.js community. But 10 years ago, it was a mix of Ruby and Python upstarts. I kinda saw those languages and communities as two sides of a coin:

* The Python guys were the upstarts who leaned toward stability and practicality. Wore slacks and polos, or maybe t-shirts and jeans.

* The Ruby guys were more of the "move fast and break things" school, and favored aesthetics over performance. Had numerous tattoos, and shaved with vintage German double-edged safety razors and a badger brush.

It feels like Node took all the oxygen out of the room in terms of racing to be the Java replacement. But how have the shifts affected the identity of the Ruby community? Did they get older, mature, and come to resemble the Python community culturally? Or are there still a lot of young people disrupting things rapidly, and you just don't hear about it as much anymore?

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#168

Post by subfay »

freehunter wrote: post #147
gumcreme wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rails scales Your post is a bit misleading. Rails can scale but to get there is different than with other stacks. Some would say, it's much more challenging or complicated, some would call it just a PITA and if you really, really want to scale, like e.g. a porn site, Rails is the worst choice you could ever take. Or you would just completely rewrite it but what is then the motivation to take a framework? Maybe fram…

So let's just forget about Basecamp, Github, AirBnb, Hulu, Kickstarter, MyFitnessPal, Twitch and all the other Rails sites and continue to pretend Rails can't scale and won't work for the modern web.

None of them is on a standard unmodded Rails stack.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#169

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #44

I don't know how to quantify how relevant Rails is today, but I do think it's interesting to explore why Rails isn't as popular as it once was. I remember just eight years ago, Rails was on the HN frontpage almost daily. Some ideas: I think the most critical trend has been the dissemination of the Ruby ecosystem's most popular and best ideas into every other ecosystem, which I would summarize as a culmination/caricat…

> ... it was a stark contrast to the tropes of complexity that came before it like endless XML configuration and IIS.

DHH has stated that he started Rails because of frustrations with the Java web app development ecosystem, and this rings true for me from my own experience. What surprises me about the illustration of the contrast of the two worlds is that, after 12-15 years of Rails, and the success its had in addressing its stated objectives, the Java "world" seems to only be adding to the complexity of their "standard" stack. Sure, you get install JHipster, and generate a boilerplate site now, but that process took FORTY-FIVE MINUTES on my work laptop, and I don't know half of the stuff it installed.

Re: Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019

#170

Post by Kiro »

l33cher wrote: post #77

Why are people saying stupid things like this? I'm doing rails 24/7 for the past 5 years in MANY different projects and I can say its the BEST and very relevant in 2019. I have to deal with other platforms written in different languages/frameworks like php/laravel and I can only pity developers that have to do that by choice.

I very much prefer Laravel/PHP to Rails/Ruby and I'm mostly working with Rails nowadays.
Post reply on HN