Is Rails still relevant in 2018? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#251

Post by iwr8bugs4u » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #202

fergie wrote: post #131

Rails really nailed the problems of web development as it was 10 years ago by (rightly) pointing out that 97.2% of web projects were all about making an application server talk nicely to a relational database and then generating a front end that reflected the data model and that had javascript that Just Worked (everywhere). Web dev is in a different place now. Developers don't generally install and maintain applicati…

Rails is good for two things: Fast iterating and fast on-boarding new employees. If you want to start a startup, and you know Rails, use Rails with Postgres. Do the complicated shit (data science, video uploads, etc) in your other language if you have complicated shit. Use a different subdomain or get nginx to fork the endpoints for the complex shit if it needs to be public. I've known plenty of people, myself includ…

> Then I spent hours fiddling with types and boiler plate code and catching errors.

LOL. Dealing with your buggy code upfront instead of waiting for it to bomb at runtime. The horror!

I bet you just write perfect code all the time. LOL

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#252

Post by ksec » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #23

RoR is relevant as long as the community is active, as long as there is job demand (see crossover, Stackoverflow, etc.). It is an excellent framework with gems to act as plugins (rack middleware) to serve websockets, forums, admin interfaces all with a few lines of configuration. Google, Microsoft, Facebook all maintain Ruby libraries in GitHub. So as long as you are doing Joe's textile website, it is the right tool.…

>Cloud scaling rails can be expensive, as apparent from horror stories [0] but a few manually managed instances with a load balancer and good web servers can go a long way.

I think they are doing something about it. Ruby 3x3 and Rails 6.0. One of the problem is resources, there isn't a massive company like Google / Facebook / Amazon backing Ruby and Rails with Man power and funding. It is all open source.

I am wondering if any is using helix. There were previously another idea Rubex [1] from SciRuby, making Ruby / C Code collaboration easier.

[1]https://github.com/SciRuby/rubex

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#253

Post by cutler » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #109

thinkingkong wrote: post #16

I mean... Let's pause for a minute and remove the year, and remove the language / framework. What are we trying to accomplish? If we know something really well and there are enough developers to support an ecosystem and the talent pool in your is big enough just use whatever you want. PHP in 2018? SURE. C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist) Rails in 2018? Youre damn right I would. GO in 2018? OK. Fine. Whatever. This is…

...our jobs are to make stuff that works in a predictable, less risky way. Do that. This is very true, but it doesn't mean "Use the thing that's worked in the past because that's less risky." Languages get better and tooling improves, and if you're still using one that isn't keeping up then you're increasing risk. These days if your chosen language doesn't have things like strong typing, interfaces, good debugging to…

Cue the descent into static vs. dynamic typing.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#254

Post by golergka » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #218

golergka wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you should know where to write code optimized for perfomance and where to write code optimized for readability. It's the latter 95% of the time.

"It's the latter 95% of the time." Still, that's no excuse to write readable code that for example runs in O(N^2) when there would be just as readable O(N) alternatives.

This is a true statement, which very rarely applies to actual Linq usage.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#255

Post by owens99 » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #202

fergie wrote: post #131

Rails really nailed the problems of web development as it was 10 years ago by (rightly) pointing out that 97.2% of web projects were all about making an application server talk nicely to a relational database and then generating a front end that reflected the data model and that had javascript that Just Worked (everywhere). Web dev is in a different place now. Developers don't generally install and maintain applicati…

Rails is good for two things: Fast iterating and fast on-boarding new employees. If you want to start a startup, and you know Rails, use Rails with Postgres. Do the complicated shit (data science, video uploads, etc) in your other language if you have complicated shit. Use a different subdomain or get nginx to fork the endpoints for the complex shit if it needs to be public. I've known plenty of people, myself includ…

Check out the Rail API gem. It's default in Rails 5 and makes JSON and HTML the default.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#256

Post by cutler » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

Jedi72 wrote: post #43

sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

Elixir/Phoenix is the spiritual successor to Rails. Same philosophy of batteries included, developer productivity focussed etc. But with lots of great new shiny things, for example websockets is built directly into the framework, its not an add-on. Its not a direct upgrade, but if you value Rails definitely check it out

Please, let's lose this Elixir = Ruby.new nonsense. Once you get beyond the superficial syntax similarities between Elixir and Ruby the 2 languages couldn't be further apart. Ruby is mutable/OOP whilst Elixir is immutable/FP. Diametrically opposite so anyone who is heavily invested in Ruby's OOP mindset is going to have a shock if they dive into Elixir.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#257

Post by ksec » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

This is pretty amazing. Both GitHub and Shopify are huge, billion dollar companies running on the original apps made over a decade ago. And they now both on the latest Rails, helping to push the framework forward [1]

I can't wait for y'all to see what we upstream now that we're in a position to give back and improve Rails. My keynote; Rails 6.0: Scalable by Default [2] at RailsConf was just a small portion of our plans for Rails. [3]

There are also work from Discourse on Rails performance, Ruby is getting a Method JIT. [4] and working on more pref work. TruffleRuby is close to 1.0 and it is available on all ruby manager [5]. The Open Source build is now also available on macOS as well.

There are lots more, and all of them were years in making, It took a year for Github to get to latest Rails release.

For the past few years, many have been writing off Ruby Rails, Ruby is comparatively expensive to scale ( and it still is ) , we expect other frameworks to catch up in terms of productivity, and will spell doom to Ruby Rails. Not only has such framework yet to appear, Ruby Rails continues to improve on all front.

I say the best days of Ruby Rails has yet to come.

[1] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1030528476250562569

[2] https://speakerdeck.com/eileencodes/railsconf-2018-the-futur...

[3] https://twitter.com/eileencodes/status/1030461847256875008

[4] https://twitter.com/k0kubun/status/960112559343878144

[5] https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby/blob/master/doc/user/r...

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#258

Post by cutler » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

sydd wrote: post #170

sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

Except for 2 things: Finding developers. while it's possible it's much harder that say Java. You'll be in trouble if you are not in a metropolis and need 5+ rails developers. Long term sustainability. While it will work for your MVP, at some point you will need to rewrite it in a language that sclaes to 10.000s of lines of code and that will be painful.

Yes, this is a commonly overlooked consequence of adopting Rails. Here in London recruiters are falling over themselves trying to hire Rails developers as so many companies built their stack on Rails. However, once you leave the capital demand for Rails more ore less evaporates. Rails only thrives in tech hubs, probably due to its association with startup culture. Once you leave the capital PHP, Java and ASP.Net dominate.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#259

Post by 3pt14159 » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #225

3pt14159 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails is good for two things: Fast iterating and fast on-boarding new employees. If you want to start a startup, and you know Rails, use Rails with Postgres. Do the complicated shit (data science, video uploads, etc) in your other language if you have complicated shit. Use a different subdomain or get nginx to fork the endpoints for the complex shit if it needs to be public. I've known plenty of people, myself includ…

Agreed with all of these points. > I think it should be JSON-first, not HTML-first Isn't that the case in Rails 5? https://guides.rubyonrails.org/5_0_release_notes.html#api-ap...

Yes, I'd forgotten that that was option I should have addressed. The issue is that I want things like cookies to be supported out of the box for things like Ember, even if I want other API consumers to use locally stored tokens. But you're right. There is some attention going that way.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#260

Post by tinco » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #75

Apologies for the length here, but it seems like programming language and stack philosophy discussions simply require obscene amounts of length to produce fully-rational arguments. Trying to cut back invariably forces you to end the journey to philosophical truth with subjectively-felt emotion. Would appreciate feedback on what could be removed without compromising legibility. Programmers generally overvalue the util…

Straight up porting an app from Rails to Node.JS seems like a bad idea to me. Not that I'd ever consider using node.js, but the whole appeal is that you can quickly build small services, with either an integrating endpoint or a straight up api in front. If you're just replicating your Rails monolith you forfeit all the benefits.

To be clear instead of node I would consider either Ruby because it is more comfortable, or golang for it's simplicity and performance.