I'm currently building an app using Webpacker and Rails 6 edge, it's been great.
I Miss Rails
171–180 of 522 posts
Re: I Miss Rails
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here are two of the most popular books on Rails on Amazon, along with their page counts: "The Rails 5 Way" (1088 pages) "Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rail" (816 pages) Rails is enterprise.
What does this enterprise slur even mean ? Is it like saying a band sold out when they had a hit record? Do we only use undiscovered indie frameworks now?
When I started, Java and Spring were (still are..) enterprise (Ruby and Rails existed but were not popular in my area and network) and the major criticism in my mind was the difficulty faced as a beginner.
Spring was humongous and had so many modules that I just couldn't grasp the purpose of each (I still don't) plus there was a lot of overlapping functionality. Senior devs would come to college and ramble out stuff which made less and less sense as time passed by.
Writing a simple app became tedious without a reference by side. So that was enterprise in my mind - tedious, complicated and completely incoherent at times - what and why were completely skipped, at times, in favour of how.
At that time I discovered JS and the simplicity of assembling a decent sized app won me over. The startup ecosystem was also picking up pace in my country and speed of iteration mattered more than anything else. Granted JS can become a nightmare (which I learned later) but that speedy feedback compared to Java was enough to make node my "homestack."
There were other things which worked strongly against Java in my education - 1. Being forced to use eclipse without training (what are these buttons, what does everything do, how do i do this, I was fighting more against the IDE than anything else)
2. Being forced to use the Oracle database which was (for some xyz reason) given to us in a virtual machine and took ages to run a simple join in a small table of 100-500 records.
3. Programmers with experience can be completely oblivious to the mental model of a beginner.
All of this just soured me on "enterprise."
Re: I Miss Rails
#173We need a framework that makes it easier to build server-rendered, multi-page web apps with Node. Preferably something "batteries included," with support for recent innovations in web tech.
Re: I Miss Rails
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> joys of static type checks combined with a unified front/back data model Would you mind elaborating on the specific benefits?
With TypeScript you can define a single set of interfaces shared by both your client side and server code. If you change an interface to return a different value or rename a member, you immediately know where it’s used and can update it in tandem. Static type checking let’s you know everywhere that something is used without a battery of tests running through your app. This takes 99% of the fear out of refactoring and…
You get all of that for free with Java, plus you don't have to use javascript
Re: I Miss Rails
#175We need a framework that makes it easier to build server-rendered, multi-page web apps with Node. Preferably something "batteries included," with support for recent innovations in web tech.
Especially with the ability to build apps that require minimal client side JS (e.g. Intercooler.js).
Re: I Miss Rails
#176I really have no horse in this race, but I would like to know what the argument FOR React+Redux+GraphQL is for developing apps in 2019. Is it that we need to offer offline clients to meet user expectations? Better raw performance on the front end? Cheaper server costs or easier to deploy serverlessly? For the progressive enhancement of your resume?
Agnostic of stack, SPAs provide a clear separation of concerns. The api layer is responsible for transforming data between the client and controlling access. The client is responsible for presenting the data structures provided by the api to the user, and turning user inputs into data structures that the api can consume.
I feel like this line of thinking is very analogous to the whole microservice craze -- you shouldn't need to introduce a network boundary to write well architected software. There's no reason you can't have a clear separation of concerns in a server side rendered application.
Re: I Miss Rails
#177Re: I Miss Rails
#178I'll take a mildly unpopular opinion and say that I really despise code-gen-style web frameworks, like Rails or ASP.NET MVC or Django, and would rather reinvent the wheel than use them. I definitely see the appeal of these frameworks, but I feel that a side effect of having them is that there's a metric ton of code generated and you really have no idea how it works. I remember spending almost 30 minutes digging throu…
I don’t think I’m that old... but I’m very much in the same boat as you.
Then again not everything I work on has to do with web or API’s so maybe that colours things a bit for me.
I think I know exactly what you’re saying and I agree. Also no less the hypocrite here, but like WW said “I am large, I contain multitudes”!
Re: I Miss Rails
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually the bane of JS community's existence. JS developed so fast and so wildly that there was never a breather to form and write down best practices or opinions. This is jarring to someone coming from the Rails world where a lot of magic is happening, there are strict opinions (heck, it's in the subtitle of the copy) and strict conventions to adhere too. JS is wild west compared to that. This is not to say…
I don't understand. One is server application development, one is client development. They are two vastly different things. From this hot take on JS, I'd think people are suggesting that the development experience of all the other available clients are a lot better, but then I became an Android and iOS developer and that's not true either. Swift isn't bad, but the language isn't the only thing that dictates how hard…
I think we're diverging. The mental model of a Rails developers is well formed and if you're a beginner then you can rely on a very strong community for opinions, best practices and conventions to follow. This greatly decreases cognitive load and immensely improves productivity.
When you make a jump to a JS stack (whether client side or server side) you have a lot of options but no best practices or conventions to follow. You have to make a lot of choices which have already been made for you in RoR. Even though SPA frontend dev has settled between React and Vue, you still have to make a lot of decisions. React also bills itself as a view library. You have to make decisions about state management (if needed), routing etc etc. A vast chunk of these decisions are made for you in RoR so that you just work on the app. I think this is what the author was lamenting about.
Re: I Miss Rails
#180I still develop using server-rendered like it's 2012. Since I'm pretty much an indie dev, I just don't think it's worth my time to initally start a project off REST API (i.e. using react) because it's literally 1 more layer to take care off. I.e. if a REST end-point name changes, then I'd have to modify both frontend and backend code. In addition to that, initially, getting a software specs is a much harder problem t…
As a beginner, Rails seems much easier to get from zero to something. So much of the tutorials I’ve seen on react are about dependencies and environment setup. I know React has some big advantages but on smaller teams/projects it’s hard to see the benefit.