Rails is unmatched. I wish there was just a similar framework in a faster language.
Laravel or Symfony using PHP
The One-Person Framework in Practice
71–80 of 172 posts
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get why .NET barely ever gets mentioned in these threads. Even new or niche frameworks like Phoenix, loco.rs and others get mentioned, but almost never .NET. It's as "convention over configuration" as it gets.
Platform support and open-sourcedness. The Phoenix 1.0 release predates the first open-source and Linux-supported .NET release by a year, for example. .NET is just now starting to shake off its association as a closed-source, Windows-only thing.
.NET has been open source since a decade
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#73Is there any other framework which can claim that it compares well to Ruby on Rails speed of development? I.e. conventions over configurations? Asking as I don’t want to learn ruby
Laravel. Massive batteries included ecosystem and the mental model for PHP programming fits the web so freaking good. Rails 8 tried to catch up by beginning to shape the first party queue story, while Laravel has been there for a decade and the tools have been vetted at scale. For a skilled developer who knows any of the major MVC web frameworks, they’re all really productive, just in slightly different ways.
One big up for Laravel and also Symfony, the other big PHP framework!
And now with InertiaJS, there are no more API endpoints necessary for any UI stuff. The data just gets prepared in the controller in PHP and gets directly loaded as JSON into the React/Vue/Svelte frontend pages, thats it!
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#74I don't know if the framework really matters that much? Just choose anything popular and there should be plenty of help available. I've been using Laravel for about 11 years now. I hate it, but it keeps on trucking along so I've resisted the urge to do a complete rewrite. I don't think anything is particularly slow to develop. It's the business side of things that's the hard part.
When I moved from PHP to Ruby (and Rails), I discovered how much fun programming can be. Ruby just optimizes for the right thing, Developer happiness.
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Platform support and open-sourcedness. The Phoenix 1.0 release predates the first open-source and Linux-supported .NET release by a year, for example. .NET is just now starting to shake off its association as a closed-source, Windows-only thing.
.NET has been open source since a decade
And Ruby on Rails was released 20 years ago
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#76I don't have any experience in Rails, but similar experience with Django. I am running several apps on my own, while still working elsewhere full-time.
The largest one has around 250 views, of maybe 80 are just basic admin views. It is basically comparable to an ERP of a medium-side company with various levels of permissions etc. I was able to get most of the functionality into production in just one month -- I was not working full-time at that time. I have estimated it with some friends, and such an ERP in the corporate world would normally take a team two years to do -- one to spec and another to implement.
It has 1-2M monthly page views depending on the season, and the highest hitting pages are read-only and heavily cached, so the server load is minimal. I am further increasing the performance by making those pages static HTML using django-distill and using Cloudflare to cache/serve them.
The key thing is to keep things as simple as possible. I avoid REST/heavy frontend frameworks whenever possible. For most views for most apps, normal HTML form request-response user interface based on Bootstrap is perfectly fine.
I started by sprinkling Javascript when it was really needed, for example client side sorting so I can avoid server load. Now I use AlpineJS/HTMX for the interactivity. It has been great, although much slower to implement.
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#77I'm currently building an application to launch it soonish. I'm using Rails and doing everything myself (save for the design of the logo, and some input from a friend on UX). What's more is that I'm building mobile applications using Hotwire Native. I'm a solo developer building 2 mobile apps(iOS and Android), supported by a fully functional web application and done with vanilla Rails with Hotwire Native. I'm surpris…
I just wish Ruby had something with the widespread adoption of TypeScript. Once a project gets large enough it's really painful not having types Sorbet and RBS are okay but they don't really compare
Jake Zimmerman wrote this excellent blog post[1] on the current state of Sorbet.
I was impressed at recent changes in the Sorbet syntax but also with the proposal that we make code comments available to the ruby VM.
That would allow Sorbet to adopt the rbs-inline comment syntax for both runtime checks and static analysis.
So there does appear to be a way forward on this, which is pretty exciting.
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#78Rails is unmatched. I wish there was just a similar framework in a faster language.
Elixir + Phoenix?
Indeed. Runtime is typically a lot faster than Rails. Response times in dev mode are My personal dev speed however is a little slower in Phoenix than Rails. And I've been using Rails for almost 20 years and Elixir for 10.
There are categories of problems that are much easier in Elixir (High concurrency, low latency, etc) and for those I would always pick Elixir. If you're planning "just" a crud like web application, Ruby will probably get you to product-market-fit faster. There are (well maintained) gems for almost everything.
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#79I don't know if the framework really matters that much? Just choose anything popular and there should be plenty of help available. I've been using Laravel for about 11 years now. I hate it, but it keeps on trucking along so I've resisted the urge to do a complete rewrite. I don't think anything is particularly slow to develop. It's the business side of things that's the hard part.
It matters a lot. I attribute my success at running a one-man business to Laravel (inspired by Rails). Having a batteries-included framework designed to support high-level business goals reduces so much cognitive load and the amount of code you need to write. Previously I had 10+ years of experience writing apps in basic Python frameworks like Flask but I would need to spend far more time writing code to implement basic features. Another thing that drastically reduces complexity is having the backend and frontend in a single codebase. In Rails that is achieved with Turbolinks and in Laravel it’s done with Livewire. It reduces code complexity by a factor of 2x at least (in practice it’s like 10x simpler compounded over years of maintenance).
Re: The One-Person Framework in Practice
#80I would argue that framework isn't the winning component, the people are. A lot of people can say similar things for framework > and they'd be right given their own experience but I think they give themseleves too little credit. I've written my own frameworks for smaller projects because I didn't want the needless learning curve / cruft of a generalized framework and I can tell you they saved me so much time / effort / cost over the long term and they were tuned to my development style. All built with python and some off-the-shelf libraries. I'm not saying there's no place for generalized frameworks. They do help streamline development efforts and set a standardized model for building out your app/service which would be great with a team of people all tuned in to a specific framework but I would argue that in a single developer environment it doesn't matter much what you use, so long as you have fun with it. Productivity analyses are at best personal opinions in a forum like this.
Edit: basic grammar.