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Status of Sails.js

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Re: Status of Sails.js

#51

Post by gmmeyer »

traviswebb wrote: post #43
kevinob11 wrote: post #42

I've been using sails for about 18 months, this has me pretty worried and I've experienced a lot of the issues (bugs, long delays on issues and pull requests) others have described. What other nodejs stacks (hapi + ORM?, kraken + ??, etc) do others use to create server apis without having to write a ton of boilerplate for each route / model?

Interestingly, even though the node.js community is growing quickly and has a lot of great tools, I think your options are mainly Sails.js and Meteor. Meteor, imho, focuses much more efforts around building shiny things to convincing new developers to try it out. It has gained a reputation of being a great framework for writing hello world in 60 seconds, but not for building real business applications. Sails is a gre…

Keystone, too: https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone

Re: Status of Sails.js

#52

Post by qaq »

dankohn1 wrote: post #35

My last startup was built on top of Node.js, Sequelize and Postgres, which worked fine for us. At my current one, we are re-implementing a ton of very detailed business logic from a PHP/Cake app, while writing comprehensive functional and browser tests. We considered Sails.js but decided the framework was immature vs. Ruby on Rails. Rails has worked great for us, and has a ludicrously evolved ecosystem, with fantasti…

Isomorphic Javascript has very little to do with trendy and mainly a function of optimizing for mobile experience e.g. reducing latency, smaller payloads which means SPA and websockets and in real world SPA needs to support SEO, FB scraper etc. so Isomorphic is the only viable real world option.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#53

Post by uptownJimmy »

sergiotapia wrote: post #39
delbel wrote: post #21

Currently a week or two in on a new project using Sails. Any alternatives? Originally, I was going to use just Hapi + Sequalize. Thanks

Meteor - it's webdev that doesn't suck.

It's webdev that doesn't support a properly robust db. When they finally fix that Achilles' heel, they might have a chance of lasting long-term. MongoDB is not gonna cut it.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#54

Post by uptownJimmy »

jondubois wrote: post #5

That's what happens when the maintainers of a project start to put their hands in too many baskets. They are undertaking big and highly speculative projects instead of projects which address immediate community pain points. I think Meteor did a better job in this respect. That said, Meteor's services are a bit too expensive.

It befuddles me as to why the folks at Meteor chose MongoDB. I know Mongo's marketing was superb, but the product itself is/was so shoddy.

Never mind the fact that you gotta have SQL for almost any robust enterprise app, which, in turn, is such a huge chunk of the market.

I just don't understand the hitching of the Meteor wagon to that broke-down MongoDB horse.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#55

Post by hitekker »

duhruh wrote: post #8
jph wrote: post #4

Compare the new Trails JS: https://github.com/trailsjs/trails The Trails project is developing thanks to Travis Webb and team, and his reasons are described in the pull request. The Trails README includes this intro: "Trails is built and maintained by former members of the Sails.js core team, and offers an upgrade path from existing Sails applications, but it utilizes exactly zero lines of code from the original Sail…

Yea I've noticed this too, mostly because Travis threw up a comment on multiple GH issues on my Sails library e.g. https://github.com/waterlock/waterlock/issues/99#issuecommen... I've looked over these issues and noticed Travis is just copy/pasting the same message stating "Sails.js is no longer actively maintained". It seems like this guy has a real vendetta against Mike (the creator of Sails) and is dead set on get…

Your language puts Travis's post in the worst possible light, "vendetta", "compatible or die" etc, when in actuality, most Sails.js devs, including myself, up until this post, were unsure about the continuity of the project.

If I were to speculate, I believe this diction has less to do with Travis hating Mike and more to do with the fear of being outmoded, i.e. "We built our library on SailsJS and it would be unthinkable/very difficult to change if SailsJS was subsumed by another project"

Comments on your main library give credence to this fear, such as the one posted by the main dev just recently in the Github issues:

> Waterlock has been struggling recently because of a lack of time from the guys that maintain it. I've tried to do what I can and so have the other guys. But there hasn't been enough going on recently.

Factoring in that Waterlock has 43 open issues since 2014 that have either not been closed or given a label, I can see why there would be uncertainty over this library's future.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#56

Post by hitekker »

jakejake wrote: post #26
kevinburke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know, perhaps sails is riddled with unfixed bugs? I wrote about a fair amount of unexpected behavior with Sails/Waterline. Some of these have since been fixed, some of them (Waterline defaults to dropping tables unless you have NODE_ENV=production in an env var) are deliberate decisions and hence not "fixable". https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/dont-use-sails-or-waterline/ There's a fair amount of other stuff I…

Sounds like at least a few of those are legit concerns, if not bugs. Like I said, I don't really know much about Sails. I was just interested in the idea that ~10 commits per month would be insinuated to be an abandoned project.

Depends on the kind of projects. In the "heavy" web framework category ("we take care of lots of the busy work for you"), an established project like Django can expect 256 commits a month:

https://github.com/django/django/pulse/monthly.

For rails, 468:

https://github.com/rails/rails/pulse/monthly

ExpressJS, on the other hand, only had 5 commits this past month, but one could argue that it's not as "heavy" as SailsJS and others are trying to be.

I agree commit count by itself is not a good pulse on a project's life, but, as this thread shows, there's a lot of issues left unresolved. Not mentioned yet one of the lead developers posted on Sails.js future right here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/2p2i40/is_sailsjs_dea...

The most important line is:

> There's not much really left to add to Sails other than bug fixes at this point.

All these indicators together = a dead project.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#57

Post by k__ »

Are frameworks like this really a thing anymore? Okay, I have to admit I always avoided frameworks that incorporate code generators, so I don't really know.

When using Node.js I always just throw some small modules together and be done with it. It also seems to me, that newer modules encourage this behavior, for example Koa is more modular than Express.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#58

Post by dbg31415 »

Little more digging... here's what I think is going on, and it's sad.

I've pieced this together based on Google searches.

Sails was started by Mike McNeil, who also started a company called Balderdash to do consulting and dev work using Sails. From what I can tell Balderdash isn't quite a "real" company in that everyone listed as working there also does other things at present (http://i.imgur.com/dFVQawi.png). (Mike also started a product company that utilizes Sails called Treeline. Full disclosure, I've been to some of their meetups in Austin, they seemed like clever guys.)

LinkedIn paints a slightly different picture (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=2604050) with a few more employees listed, including listing both Mike and Travis Webb as "CEO" (http://i.imgur.com/onnhqqO.png).

Given the size of the company, and the fact that the staff seem to be doing other things, I'd assume someone told Travis, "Hey you can be CEO, but you have to hit some metrics... and if you don't you can't be CEO any more..." And given some of the bickery on the other threads... maybe it wasn't clear or maybe those metrics weren't possible given the range of projects Mike and the other people were working on. We've all been there... Client says, "Yeah we'd like to work with you, but... Do A, B, C, and fix X, Y, Z first..." maybe Travis needed Mike's help and didn't get it. But who knows, and regardless it sounds like Travis was shown the door.

So, and you can see this in the numerous videos where Travis has been promoting Sails the last few years (just Google, he comes up for all the training / discussions around Sails), Travis really liked Sails, and had his feelings hurt because he couldn't work on the project he really liked. And in response, he's now saying, "Burn the ships, Sails is dead, everyone come with me to Trails."

Guy goes from being a huge Sails fanboy in hours and hours of videos that are posted online, to coming here 2 weeks later saying, paraphrased, "I'm going to build my own Sails... with blackjack, and hookers." This scenario sucks for everyone.

You hire a good dev, someone who knows how to get the technology side done... he offers to step up to a bigger role... but who knows, maybe he can't make sales, can't retain customers, he isn't a leader, or isn't focused on the company needs because he's only interested in being a dev... but wants the title of CE-something because he's 22 and it's an ego boost... so rather than leave with dignity, and move on to his next job going back to what he was good at, he is out to sink the people he had been working with.

That's my read. I could be totally wrong, but the drama here peeked my curiosity and after an hour of digging around that's what I came up with.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#59

Post by traviswebb »

dbg31415 wrote: post #58

Little more digging... here's what I think is going on, and it's sad. I've pieced this together based on Google searches. Sails was started by Mike McNeil, who also started a company called Balderdash to do consulting and dev work using Sails. From what I can tell Balderdash isn't quite a "real" company in that everyone listed as working there also does other things at present ( http://i.imgur.com/dFVQawi.png ). (Mik…

Your assessment is perfectly logical based on the information you have available, and also mostly wrong.

First, I'm not 22, and our COO ran the largest jQuery cobsulting firm (appendTo) for 5 years. Second, McNeil did not hire us, we purchased the company; McNeil has no ownership in the "new" Balderdash. Your educated guesses about hitting metrics and so forth don't apply to anything here.

Mike McNeil needs control of Sails.js because he promised it to his VC investors behind treeline. We did not know this when we entered into the acquisition of Balderdash, and that's not what we signed up for. Since we were lied to for nearly a year, we are pivoting the company and our open-source efforts toward other things. Trails is one of those things.

Re: Status of Sails.js

#60

Post by kyllo »

proyb2 wrote: post #48
kyllo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, you could just hire developers who know more than one programming language.

It take longer to adopt and learn RoR than ES6. Both have their owns strength but Javascript and Python skills can be apply to any organizations, RoR is quite limited.

There are mature, production-ready server-side web app frameworks with relational database adapters in literally every mainstream programming language (and many of the obscure ones too) except for JavaScript. I didn't say you have to do Ruby on Rails. If you prefer Python, then you can just use Django, it is more or less equivalent to Rails.
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