Ruby on Rails: Still the Best Web App Framework for Most Teams

https://naildrivin5.com/blog/2020/11/23/rails-is-the-best-choice-for-most-teams.html

by sairamkunala • 6 years ago

62 29 6 years ago

marstall• 6 years ago

Rails fanboy since 0.9. Great framework. It's just such a ... comfortable? space to be in. Highly recommend it even after all these years - though now I use it mostly for modern SPA-style apps where rails simply provides an API. Which it is, yup, great for!

Okawari2• 6 years ago

You hit the nail on the head there!

Ive been tinkering with rails since Rails 4, but in my dayjob I use Laravel a whole lot. At this point I have spent way more time in Laravel than Rails.

Yet pretty much every time I have to work with Laravel, I wish it was rails instead. Rails being "comfortable" is quite apt, and definitly something I'm missing.

cyrialize• 6 years ago

Could you go over the differences between Rails and Laravel? I'm thinking of picking up a framework for myself.

I very much enjoy the Laracasts videos and I work in PHP currently so I've though about starting their Laravel learning series.

On the other hand, I create a RoR application for my university and I've always loved Ruby - but it's been a long time since I've done anything with Ruby.

mkrishnan2• 6 years ago

What? looks like you don't really understand the power of aws/serverless/Kubernetes/kafka/cassandra/graphql/react. when your app becomes instant hit after featuring in the frontpage of HN, you will have 1 billion daily active users and your business goes into flames because of new workload.

cue_the_strings• 6 years ago

I chuckled... sensibly.

cwackerfuss• 6 years ago

You must be a masochist.. I'd rather spend 1/10th the time finding out if I have a hit on my hands and address scaling problems later than battling with kubernetes and kafka. Build product not infrastructure.

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

Yes I believe that's the joke.

slantaclaus• 6 years ago

Thats one hell of a stack

mkrishnan2• 6 years ago

I forgot to mention Hadoop/hdfs/elixir/<fancy-tech-relesed-last-week> ...

Knajjars3• 6 years ago

I did 5 years of JS full stack development (both professional and for personal projects), until I decided to learn a more "boring" and mature language and framework. Never looked back and each day I love RoR more.

stephen82• 6 years ago

I guess it assumes we already know how to use the Ruby language, therefore it's a good option to choose for new projects?

I personally know near nothing about Ruby, other than read a couple of documentation pages.

Since I don't know how to use it the right way, I cannot take any side so I can agree or not with this suggestion.

horsawlarway2• 6 years ago

For a single person project, Rails is decent.

I actually think RoR is an utter garbage fire the second you have a team of 3+.

Also, to be blunt, RoR most reminds of me of the old Microsoft web frameworks at this point (asp.net, before core). It's all pre-configured. You have very few structural choices to make, and you can focus on the actual project meat right away. The problem, coming in as someone without experience in the platform, is that documentation is becoming incredibly fragmented.

The second you need to touch a config file, suddenly you have to know exactly what version of rails you're running (because they change config names CONSTANTLY), and what the asset pipeline was like in that version, and so and such forth.

Of course, googling what you want links you to docs for Rails from 2 years ago, which no longer works.

It's eerily reminiscent of microsoft products that tried to the same thing - because "The best out of the box experience" changes every year or three, and they all try to meet current expectations.

So long post aside, having used Rails for a while professionally, but also having come in with a LOT of alternative experience (mainly Node/TSNode/C#/Golang) I find it functional, but fairly unimpressive, for small projects.

Also, the older I get, the more I want type systems. I should try giving Sorbet a spin (ruby, but with types), Because RoR on a large team is a nightmare. Types would help a lot.

HeyZuess• 6 years ago

I actually think RoR is an utter garbage fire the second you have a team of 3+.

This isn't a a Rails issue, I have worked on teams with 30+ members with no problems. It is an organizational problem.

The second you need to touch a config file, suddenly you have to know exactly what version of rails you're running (because they change config names CONSTANTLY), and what the asset pipeline was like in that version, and so and such forth.

I cannot remember the last time I needed to touch a Rails configuration truthfully. I prefer not to touch any configuration. This is a subjective opinion, but less I need to configure the app over time the more stable the configuration is. The configurations don't change that much, you expect them to change during major version releases. I don't know how often you change Rails versions.

Of course, googling what you want links you to docs for Rails from 2 years ago, which no longer works.

Ok this one I am going to strongly disagree with. Rails has some really good documentation, and solutions are very easy to find for a lot of problems.

Also, the older I get, the more I want type systems. I should try giving Sorbet a spin (ruby, but with types), Because RoR on a large team is a nightmare. Types would help a lot.

But Ruby is not a typed system out of the box, it is supposed to be duck typed. Now while I might have a leaning towards typed systems also myself, it is not a limitation of the language and layering types on top of duck typing erodes some of the flexibility.

PikachuEXE• 6 years ago

You find a way that suits you and your team.

I am using a style that's definitely won't be recognized as "the Rails way".

It's OK. We are free to develop whatever pattern with a lot of library (gem) choices. Rails has a mature & active community which is good for dev.

throwaway1892622• 6 years ago

This is flamebait but I would say no. Ruby's popularity has been in a steep decline for years now. The most rapid decline of any language tracked by stack overflow metrics. By some measures it's usage is less than 1/4 what it was at its peak.

Ruby is slow. And Rails has an outdated MVC web model when everybody is doing SPA. If you're building a SPA you don't need 90% of Rails functionality. And since Rails is the juggernaut REST framework, there's not a lot of other options.

The last thing is that Ruby's popularity has dropped so much that it's falling out of mainstream. This is kinda sad honestly, but it doesn't change reality. The most obvious example to me is lack of HTTP/2 support. The Rubyists will say "oh it's fine just put it behind a load balancer that does it". To me that's the same as putting your old mainframes in the closet so nobody sees them. Any other "mainstream" language has had HTTP/2 support for years now. Including Java which is notorious for doing everything last

nunez2• 6 years ago

I wish Ruby became what JavaScript is now. It's such a good language to write stuff in.

j_crick• 6 years ago

Didn’t you mean that the other way around? If Ruby ecosystem became what current JS ecosystem is now, it wouldn’t be Ruby anymore, at least the way people who love it love it. I’m not quite sure that it would benefit from dispersion of focus on itself onto flavour of the <insert your noun here> every <relatively frequent period of time>. It’s such a good language to write stuff in not least because indeed it keeps trying to move along the axis of that aspect of it.

nunez2• 6 years ago

I meant in its popularity, not in its insanity

Knajjars3• 6 years ago

I differ, I believe JS is in a place no other programming language should be at. Every week you have doubts of the framework/lib you chose because there is a new cool kid in town. It's just so much distraction from things that actually matter, like shipping a product

vr46• 6 years ago

Started with Ruby in 2004, loved Rails until I switched away in 2015 as the jobs market was plateauing, and has stayed where it was. But it is fantastic and I’m back to tinkering with it using the fabulous new Stimulus Reflex stuff. The market is still rubbish, though, and there’s not enough good people out there.

klaustopher• 6 years ago

I remember reading this a while back. So true https://medium.com/@timbuchwaldt/rails-is-boring-thats-great...

I am also very happystill to spin up `rails new` for every little side project

arpyzo• 6 years ago

When I understand something in Rails, it's wonderful, but the sheer quantity of "magic" in Rails makes it very difficult to deal with when you only touch Rails projects periodically.

I never had this issue with Java frameworks. I could drop into a large Java codebase almost anywhere and quickly get a lay of the land.

ericb• 6 years ago

Annotations? Beans? Generators? @Entity @Type @JsonProperty

Maybe any technology seems magical until you understand it. I see at least as much magic in Java as Ruby now.

throwaway1892622• 6 years ago

Java's codegen is mostly done with standardized annotation processors, and they write code at build time so you can go look at the source they generated if you need to. And since it's generated at build time, everything is visible to the IDE.

There's a lot of reflection magic but it's not the wild west like Ruby can be because there's limits on what you can do to a class file once it's loaded. It's mostly limited to peeking at annotations on fields and methods and calling those methods or reading fields.

You can't redefine the methods or fields on an object at runtime, which prevents a lot of misguided insanity.

tmm84• 6 years ago

On my personal project Rails' magic was okay because it simple. However, in my work I have found Rails projects written by really knowledgable Ruby users to be difficult to understand. More than likely it tends to be overuse of dynamic meta-programming.

I have worked in several languages sever side and I have never had a problem jumping into a codebase until I had a Ruby project to join.

Knajjars3• 6 years ago

I think people confuse metaprogramming with "magic

Ruby on Rails: Still the Best Web App Framework for Most Teams

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