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Existential crisis at Railsconf

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Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#21

Post by tinco »

> Unfortunately, we don’t have better options in Ruby for working with websockets.

We do! Celluloid (the actor model) is vastly superior to EventMachine in my opinion. It fits much better to Ruby's OOP style and I suspect would integrate into Rails very cleanly. I am positive that bringing any EventMachine technology into the Rails stack would be a mistake.

I am saying that with a bit of a bias as I have written my own celluloid-websocket[0] gem that comes with a Rack adapter. But I wrote it because I put a project using EventMachine websockets into production and was not happy with it. Now in a new project I can just hook up the celluloid-websockets Rack app and run it using `passenger start` or any of the Rack application servers.

Even though so many people seem to flock to Node.JS for these kinds of servers, the fact that as a language Ruby is superior to Javascript remains, even if Javascript VMs are a hundred times as fast. As long as Node.JS is run on standards compliant VM's things like promises are just lipstick on the callback hell pig. You can write clean and understandable Ruby to solve any problem, including Websocket servers. We as the Ruby community were just late to the asynchronous I/O party. Now Celluloid is production ready, there's really no reason (except for performance of course) for a Ruby developer to write Javascript on the server side.

(sorry for my extreme opinions, if you want a more nuanced deliberation on a point just ask ;))

0] https://rubygems.org/gems/celluloid-websocket

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#22

Post by dham »

After trying Clojure(and Luminus) several times over the past year I don't think it would be my go to for things that Rails is tackling. On a side note writing Clojure gave me a little anxiety so I'm trying to hold back on it for now.

After working in this stuff for a while I just use the right tool for the right job. Most of the time Rails is that tool and it allows you to just get stuff done. Sometimes Node is the right tool, or Python.

I think the new Turbolinks stuff is pretty interesting(and useful) although it doesn't help me with forms, and that's the thing I'm usually using React or Angular for these days. Angular may get crap but it's actually really good at forms.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#23

Post by dragonwriter »

railsbird wrote: post #20
hopeless wrote: post #6

LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! While they might be interesting languages (particularly Elixir) I don't see any 10x advantages their web stacks have over Rails for the typical "majestic monolith" use case. Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads. We won…

> LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! I meant those as examples based on what I see around me. That's exactly my agony, I don't know what is next and, if I did, I would be learning it already. At this point, I just feel it is not Rails. > Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websock…

You are confusing the real need to use EM aware mechanisms with a not-real inability to use abstractions over EM itself. Those are two different issues.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#25

Post by railsbird »

davidw wrote: post #3

No, Rails isn't great for web socket kinds of things, but if it were me, I'd just use something else for that, and Rails for the main site. It's still one of the best things out there for quickly iterating, and yet still maintaining some structure and discipline, from what I've seen.

Agreed. I was fine with Railsconf focus last year of being "rock solid". Rails is still the best at what it does thanks to its community.

However, Rails 5 is moving to a direction that goes against the abstractions and platform it runs on. If I don't care about this, now I have even more code and dependencies in my Rails apps. On the other hand, if that is becoming the sanctioned way of building apps, I would rather do it elsewhere. To me it is a lose-lose situation.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#26

Post by dgregd »

railsbird wrote: post #20
hopeless wrote: post #6

LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! While they might be interesting languages (particularly Elixir) I don't see any 10x advantages their web stacks have over Rails for the typical "majestic monolith" use case. Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads. We won…

> LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! I meant those as examples based on what I see around me. That's exactly my agony, I don't know what is next and, if I did, I would be learning it already. At this point, I just feel it is not Rails. > Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websock…

Nginx HTTP Push Module seems to much better solution than EventMachine. So Nginx keeps opened sockets and a Rails app sends messages via ordinary HTTP.

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpPushStreamModule

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#27

Post by railsbird »

tinco wrote: post #21

> Unfortunately, we don’t have better options in Ruby for working with websockets. We do! Celluloid (the actor model) is vastly superior to EventMachine in my opinion. It fits much better to Ruby's OOP style and I suspect would integrate into Rails very cleanly. I am positive that bringing any EventMachine technology into the Rails stack would be a mistake. I am saying that with a bit of a bias as I have written my o…

A year ago we benchmarked Celluloid and Event Machine. Celluloid was much better... on JRuby. Event Machine was better on CRuby based on our tests and, since we couldn't migrate to the JVM due to other factors, we ended-up stuck with CRuby and Event Machine.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#30

Post by railsbird »

GnwbZHiU wrote: post #17
Kiro wrote: post #10

> as developers flock to new technologies like Clojure and Elixir Is that really the case? Clojure and Elixir?

I know people who move from Ruby/Rails to Golang. No people I know move from Ruby/Rails to Clojure and Elixir

This is interesting. I hear most about Elixir, with Clojure coming second. As I said above though, those are just examples, if I knew for a certain what is next, I would be learning it already.
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