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What's new in Rails 5?

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Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#51

Post by Jgrubb »

badri wrote: post #40
berkes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…

> Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want. Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.

Hopefully so, but it seems like a very large gamble to take to basically invalidate the entire community's knowledge base on how to write code for Drupal.

On the one hand, if there's not a large market uptake of Drupal 8, there won't be any reason for community devs to learn all the new ins and outs when they could just learn the ins and outs of something smaller and simpler. On the other hand, if there's not a decent D8 developer pool for companies to hire from then I don't know how there could be a large market uptake...

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#52

Post by notNow »

dakull wrote: post #42
littlewing wrote: post #28

I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this: The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby,…

The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby, but I respect the fact that the Javascript-client-side-heavy/"single-page" part of the app is where the magic is for at least a few years now- really several years. Not really sure why you sa…

[0] by that I'm referring to the clean HTML that still looks semantic and has all the normal separation of views and styles whereas in React et al if one's inspects the code is just looks horrid.

Even though I'm a JS-first dev but I second that. ( HTML & CSS in JS ) is a bad idea and not considered to be progress from the messy yet working templating engines (JS in HTML).

Proponents love to argue that integrating HTML & CSS into JS makes it easier for testing since JS is amenable to thorough testing as opposed to HTML & CSS.

While this is partially true and template files are not straightforward to test esp when you throw app logic into the mix but it still manageable if you kept to a minimum to the view part only and don't go overboard with it.

Also and this is very important, It's a given that HTML & CSS are forgiving compared to JS when it comes to errors but that doesn't mean that it's unlikely for a developer to shoot himself in the foot or to introduce unwanted/unintended bugs in the app through them esp. CSS and these usually are harder to catch and fix.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#53

Post by berkes »

badri wrote: post #40
berkes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…

> Move to a community that encourages clean code, "craftmanship", designs, patterns and so on, you will become a better programmer. If that is what you want. Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.

> Hopefully, Drupal 8 is going to bring all those fun parts again.

I'm not all that deep in Drupal anymore, but from what I hear: I doubt it.

Drupal has to choose a target audience and focus on that. If they choose "developers", then it will become a great tool that is fun to develop in, no doubt.

But as long as it remains in a limbo between "end-users" (the one's browsing the site you are building), "webmasters/editors" (those managing the content and configuring tidbits) and "developers" this won't happen.

There are just too many conflicting interests there. Real use case: can a webmaster change some settings in the image-cache? certainly not! Changing the width of an image will break all your carefully crafted CSS grids: it is tightly coupled to the Theme (which lives in Git and goes through a release-cycle).

If Drupal chose "developers", a thing like "imagecache" won't even exist in its current set-up. It won't have a database to store its settings, nor a web-interface. Instead it would be an Image class that you can inherit and then define some settings and methods in order to get an image-derivative.

From what I've seen, Drupal 8 does not change this conceptual basis. So I highly doubt it is possible to develop sites when your basis is conflicting with what you want to do on such a crucial level.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#54

Post by ownedthx »

I'm not sure if this is baked into Rails 5, but you can get es6 support (via Babel) with the sprockets-es6 gem:

https://github.com/TannerRogalsky/sprockets-es6

Rails is still a second-class JS citizen due to the asset pipeline being opinionated and controlling compared to the node way of doing things, but it gets you closer to 'the new hotness'.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#55

Post by notNow »

mattmanser wrote: post #14
mrmondo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's hosted and fixed a lot of CMS in recent years I'll say this: choose a solution that's fit for the individual purpose. All CMS' suck, a bit like all OS' suck. As soon as you do anything non-standard their inherit flexibility becomes a burden. If you have skills in rails and need an off the shelf CMS find a popular one and use it you like but if you need to create a web 'application' look at Sinatra, r…

It's CMSes and OSes. You're looking for the plurals, so you definitely don't need to use a possessive apostrophe there because there's no ownership in the sentence. Also, because they're acronyms you pronounce by enunciating the words, my instinct would be to use OS's (as you would pronounce the 's, O-S-es). But that's up for debate. For example: The OS's kernel blew up (possessive apostrophe, the OS owns the kernel)…

Since we're picking on people for their grammar mistakes, let me throw my hat in the ring:

I'm more in favor of this convention (OS') when it comes to possessive apostrophes for word that end in an "S" which is to omit the trailing "S" and leave to the reader or interlocutor to infer the meaning from the context.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#56

Post by atwrkrmrm »

ownedthx wrote: post #54

I'm not sure if this is baked into Rails 5, but you can get es6 support (via Babel) with the sprockets-es6 gem: https://github.com/TannerRogalsky/sprockets-es6 Rails is still a second-class JS citizen due to the asset pipeline being opinionated and controlling compared to the node way of doing things, but it gets you closer to 'the new hotness'.

What do you mean JS is still a second class citizen? I'm unfamiliar with Rails asset pipeline. Do you just mean that the asset pipeline doesn't really have as much features as other build tools like Grunt and Gulp? Or is there something about asset pipeline that prevents you from using JavaScript to its full potential? (Genuinely curious. Not familiar with the JS side of Rails)

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#57

Post by 33degrees »

littlewing wrote: post #28

I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this: The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby,…

"And it won't solve the problem that the client still needs to be written primarily in Javascript." Nothing's going to solve that. But rails could definitely work on making working with Javascript front ends easier. As great as Sprockets is, it doesn't fit so will in modern JS workflows.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#58

Post by atwrkrmrm »

littlewing wrote: post #28

I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this: The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby,…

I'm the opposite. This release excites me more than it did for Rails 4.

Turbolinks 3 sounds like it's going to be real nice. My biggest reason for using SPA's are not the components, or the data flow, or the states, etc. It's for the partial rendering and the nested views. With Turbolinks 3 coming out, if it is as advertised, then I will pretty much be reaching for Rails for most of my projects.

I've moved on from Rails to Node for websockets. For ActionCables, the real-time library for Rails, I have to admit that it does kind of sound like a PITA to have a second server running for it. Doesn't sound right. But I can't judge it before it comes out (nor do I really have any right to judge. It's so easy to be entitled as a FOSS user). But if it is a pleasure to use, just like the rest of the Action* family, then that's another nail in the coffin for my use case for anything else. But then again, my needs and your needs may be different. I usually build small to medium sized apps that will never hit 4 figures in terms of users.

It sounds like you're looking for that "magic" you've felt when you first got into Ruby and RoR. We all do! But things like Rails once comes once in a blue moon, so even though it may not be the new hotness, I just like to appreciate that it happened. I don't think you'll find any other tech that will give you that "this is it!" feeling like Rails did for a long while.

In the mean time, instead of stressing out about tools, just focus on writing good software.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#59

Post by pbowyer »

berkes wrote: post #25
Jgrubb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently working for a company that has all of it's websites in Drupal, so my team is versed in PHP. I've been working with Drupal for 7 straight years. I have this dream of not having to work with Drupal ever again, so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this fo…

> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…

> So I wrote some op-eds on why Drupal was not always a good choice for projects (most notably: government projects) citing from my experience as rescue-consultant-for-failing-drupal-projects.

How did those go down and what happened after you wrote them (both from the community & potential clients)?

I am sorely tempted to publish some I've written about a CMS over the last 3 years, but prudence has kept me silent so far.

Re: What's new in Rails 5?

#60

Post by headz »

bshimmin wrote: post #6

This is a great summary, and there look to be some really interesting things coming in Rails 5. Two thoughts: 1) I hope ActionCable is as seamless to integrate and works as well as Rails features ought to; you can, of course, achieve web sockets right now using Faye or various other implementations, but it's quite complex to get right (though the faye-rails gem is pretty handy) - and realtime functionality is becomin…

2) Why? Have you ever tried it? I use it on all my projects and it works great.
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