This reinforces what I see a lot too - people creating yet another XYZ, but rarely I see someone go and create an integrated solution to streamline development processes or make things easier or clearer.
There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you, but I want nothing to do with either, and do not have problems that those are meant to solve. I love ruby, and I love rails.
DHH regularly sounds the drum of rationality - in a community at large of idealists and extremists. He is the reason I got into programming, and constantly serves to remind me that what I'm doing is, in fact, perfectly fine; and that everyone else puts up with a lot of nonsense for no great reason.
There are other frameworks out there, but you'd be hard pressed to find one with a leader that has such a sense of direction and reason for why the framework does what it does, and does not.
I am a rails dev. I inherited a legacy application. The biggest problem with Ruby/Rails is that anything Ruby will allow, someone will do. Ruby is the language I learned data structures and algorithms in, built my first significant projects in. It has a generous wealth of helpful builtins. But it makes me long for strictness, static typing, a language where not just anything can completely modify any other.
This. Often, you can't find where this variable or function comes from. You read the sources only to discover that there is no trace of this variable and it is probably defined dynamically in some callback. You can only find this kind of stuff with the help of debugger. The dynamism, which allows one to create beautiful interfaces, and is often advertised as a programmer's friend, is actually the enemy of the programmer who is going to read the code afterwards.
I've actually run into methods defined from names concatenated from multiple strings, i.e. methods you can't even use grep over the whole codebase to find. This has left me with a lingering vague fear ever since.
I used to work at places where we cared deeply about our code. You should see some of the code reviews from one of the places, sometimes they got kinda ridiculous and people got into arguments about coding style and the discussion never ended... But the code was great. I kept it for some time after leaving the job and I looked at it to see how good a Rails project can be. Ah, we had over 90% code coverage from the beginning too.
Without Rails, I don't think that codebase would have been as maintainable as it was.
Then at my next job after that, I was hired as a Rails developer. Rails was a dependency and they used controllers and views and wrote the most insane code I have ever seen. Not that many tests, and the tests we had required a significant amount of setup and no one really knew how to run them (and make them pass).
I'm used to Rails being nice and friendly to work with, so joining a project where they fucked up everything really sucked, because I know what it's like to work in a good rails app.
I feel that ways as well... and I'm loving F# for being easy to write and read and yet giving me algebraic data types which allow me to better to model the domain I'm working in and for forcing me to explicitly demarcate what's mutable and what's not.
You should check out Scott Wlaschin's talk, Domain Modeling with F# if you get the chance. https://vimeo.com/97507575
> There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you
It might be hard to believe now, but Rails also went through this stage of vocal supporters advocating for it over alternatives. If you go back and watch the introduction video [1], you have DHH creating a blog in 15 minutes using RoR. I remember being impressed by it and vocally pushing for it where I worked then. :)
Crikey that takes me back. Almost 12 years ago! I was 23 then and big-time into .NET but caught wind of this and watched it (hooray for student housing with decent net speeds -- sometimes, off-peak!) with an amused smirk as so much other tech stuff that comes and goes. Funny, this kind of stuff wouldn't raise an eyebrow today, other than "15 minutes to create a blog" in a fresh framework install being perceived as suspiciously cumbersome at best! ;) do realize that it was a much needed breath of fresh air back in the day for what was the widespread "LAMP stack" (linux/apache/mysql/php for ye young'uns) ..
> There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you
Can you give examples of the 'lot of vocal people' saying 'you should be doing everything in Go or Angular'? I don't see this. I only hear this kind of black/white sentiment when filtered via junior devs.
Experienced devs I know get there are trade-offs. And I don't see anyone on the React/Angular/Vue teams saying that server-sidey Django/Rails/etc. apps are 'wrong'.
At least once a week I read comments or a submission about how X should be written in Rust. That's a pretty common occurrence here; if you stay long enough it'll be another language.
I've seen a lot of Rust posts on HN lately, but none saying you must ditch mature frameworks like Rails for Rust equivalents (there aren't any yet, and they know that, for one).
Where's the evidence for this claim DHH/Rails is the only rational force in a sea of extremists?
(Of course the dull reality with real apps is "it's complicated" and most devs are busy grappling with that).
> modern rails apps are a perfect example of the complexity you want to avoid
Nope. This is a misnomer that get's passed around a lot, and it's not based on anything factual. It's also dangerous, because people will read that and think "oh, i guess rails is bad". but it's not.
When you leverage the framework and best practices, it's great. There are different styles that can make things more complex, sure - but that's by no means the fault of rails.
People can go overboard at any level of the stack - rails won't stop you from this. Things can get sloppy and not perform efficiently - or become convoluted. again - not the fault of rails.
Sometimes, you need a little magic. Ruby (and rails) makes this possible. But if you rely heavily on magic, it'll bite you in the end.
> formalizing conventions, eliminating valueless choices, and offering a full-stack framework that provides great defaults for anyone who wants to create a complete application
Maybe I've drank the kool-aid too much, but I agree with this whole-heartedly.
It reminds me of when I want to paint a room. I can go to Home Depot and spend an hour picking out all the tools I need, or I can buy one of those pre-packed toolkit and get to the actual painting immediately.
Rails + Heroku = My product will be ready to demo by end of the week.
Obviously this mentality only applies to people like me who wants to get things done quickly. People who value craftsmanship and specificity should do what pleases them. (That's not to say you can't do quality work with pre-packed toolkits)
In the last few months I've built a brand new Node + Express application, and I've built a brand new Rails 5.x one.
ES6 has taken the edge off of some of the more obnoxious parts of JavaScript, but it still has a long way to go to catch up to Ruby, and Express is a cheap imitation of Rails.
It takes me over a day to get an Express application up and running. There's dozens of dependencies to wrangle into place. There's hundreds of lines of code to sketch in even the most basic of applications. So many directories to create, so many new files you have to basically build by hand. There's Gulpfiles to configure. There's a lot of work to integrate Passport. It's a lot of work to get as far as "Hello, world".
Meanwhile rails new and some Gemfile dependencies get you almost all the way there within an hour. Then you're making database migrations and laying in CSS and layouts.
I love both Node and Ruby for different reasons, but the out-of-the-box experience for Express is total garbage. You can't even parse a cookie without installing a module for that.
Node is way easier to create real-time services, like a Socket.io server in JavaScript is way less fuss than Ruby+EventMachine. It absolutely kills it when writing thin JSON APIs, and in terms of performance it's ridiculous. There's nothing preventing Node from having a Rails-like easy start for web applications but the attitude of the community where making decisions for people and having sane defaults is apparently against the rules.
> It takes me over a day to get an Express application up and running.
I feel so much better after seeing this sentiment here. I've tried to dip my toe into the node.js world repeatedly only to feel like I'm trudging through setup for hours.
Of course I may have incorrect memories of how difficult/easy it was to set up my first rails app however long ago.
I should also add it "only" takes me a day because I can crib from a half dozen other Express projects I've created in the past and cherry-pick cut-and-paste parts that I like.
As one example my web app Gulpfile has evolved significantly from the first iteration and it would take multiple days to recreate all of that from scratch.
The Rails Asset Pipeline might be obnoxiously rigid, but at least it works without having to tear your hair out.
Nothing exotic but even a routine web application can have 150-250 lines of Gulp directives. Zero of this is provided for you.
Each chunk is fairly small, but they add up. You want linting, auto-restart on changes, tests, your various asset chains to compile things correctly, etc.
Node is like walking into a Home Depot when you want a house. Technically you can build one out of the bits they can provide, but it's a ton of work.
The thing is Node could offer the Rails out-of-the-box experience through a package that provided sane defaults. There's nothing preventing people from doing this but cultural resistance.
If you want to build a house, go to Home Depot. If you want to buy one and move in, go to a real estate agent. Standing in the middle of Home Depot complaining about how no one there seems to want to talk about about plats or points doesn't seem like a very worthwhile use of time.
There are a large number of projects offering a Rails-style OOTB experience in Node. None of them is blessed as the Node framework. This is because there is no one to do the blessing. Node's developer culture being one you find unsatisfactory is not an example of "resistance". It is an example of difference. And if you do not find the Node style to provide you comfort, there is absolutely no requirement anywhere that you partake of it.
> There are a great number of projects offering a Rails-style OOTB experience in Node.
Which would these be? Even the best tend to fall far short of the full Rails experience.
> And if you do not find the Node style to provide you comfort, there is absolutely no requirement anywhere that you partake of it.
Translation: "If you don't like it, fuck off."
That's not how the Node community has treated me as long as I've been a part of it. The people I've interacted with are often very welcoming, encouraging and responsible. I'm talking about cultural conventions, not individual attitudes.
The difference is that the Node world is used to things taking time to put together. The Rails world finds this to be unbelievably fussy. Python people from the Django realm are in the middle.
To promote a new way of doing things, like Rails did, is an effort way beyond my singular capability. It will require a lot of like-minded individuals to go "You know, maybe we could make something that wraps around Express and gives you a Rails-like experience for those that want it." and then work towards making that happen.
Rails showed us all that web development didn't have to be PHP and Apache and constant headaches. Node and Phoenix and the modern paradigm in general wouldn't have come into existence, or achieved the popularity they have, without an act like Rails to follow. That's awesome, and I respect it for that.
But can it truly be said that Rails has a purpose today? Its default performance remains lousy with any kind of load. Its convention-first approach means Rails knowledge doesn't easily generalize, as can be seen in this very comment thread from the experience of those who've approached the Node ecosystem as though it were "Javascript on Rails". The "history? what history?" attitude of its BDFL and his clique makes cause for trepidation out of the prospect of maintaining a Rails app over a significant length of time. And even by comparison with ES5, Ruby is a hot mess.
I get that DHH has to defend it. It's his baby, after all. But it's been a long time indeed since Rails had anything unique to offer beyond an ideology which is, in its own way, every bit as much a straitjacket as RMS' - and Rails' inheritors have innovated in ways that straitjacket makes it very hard at best for Rails to match.
JS is simply the language that runs in the browser... even with newer options for compiled code coming close to being a reality, it'll be a while before tooling catches up.
JS is actually a decent language, and imho with more recent advancements better still. Combined with npm there is simply anything you might need available (for the most part). Not that there aren't a lot of gems out there.
In the end, having one language to think about, rather than how to shoehorn communications and logic between two languages is simply more difficult. I went, similarly from C# to node, not because I didn't like C#, but because the friction in writing JS on the server and the client was so reduced from two differing languages throughout the day.
Similarly a lot of devs went to simpler data stores so they don't have to deal with layers of ORMs that only half work, and can simply store and query basic data forms. Mongo fits this development model well, early hiccups in the technology aside.
In the end, it allows you to build web apps in one language, and not have to write translations to get from one to the other on the client.
I've helped maintain REST APIs in both Java and NodeJS at different points in time.
Doing so in Java was always a painful iterative process; ask the ORM for data, painstakingly map the data to Java DTOs created mostly for defining JSON structure, pass it off to RESTEasy or some similar framework, see how the JSON turned out. Adjust and repeat until satisfied. Yuck.
In NodeJS, by contrast, fire off the SQL to get the data, map into the JS object that you need and return it.
Kind of funny how, years back, a selling point of GWT was that you could use the same language across the stack. It wasn't a bad idea, just a poor choice of language.
JS(ES5) runs across a wider range of devices than Ruby. If the core premise is to build a single framework to consolidate all development JS(ES5) is a better run-time to target.
One can argue that Ruby is prettier, but JS can be very good with thoughtful api design.
I'll bite :-) Keep in mind that I don't mind using Ruby at all, and consider it historically a good incremental improvement over what we used to have. I'll happily code in Ruby any day.
ES5, for me, was a complete surprise because I wasn't really expecting to enjoy using it. Perhaps I let myself be unduly influenced by the crowds ;-).
Prototypical inheritance is surprisingly nice. It is a simple concept and it is obvious exactly what's going on under the hood (if you care to look ;-) ). It allows a lot of functionality without requiring a large amount of language syntax. Ruby, on the other hand, has a more complicated (perhaps one can say more sophisticated) system, but requires a lot of language features to implement. Things like method_missing and all of the meta programming features feel bolted on.
ES5 has this really nice core design where language features just pop out. So private accessibility is done simply by using closures, etc. You have higher order functions without the absolute craziness of procs and blocs. Even things like mixins and traits are incredibly easy to implement with a couple of lines of code. Ruby, on the other hand, is a kind of byzantine structure where everything is bolted on with C code and the language itself is rather inflexible.
I really like the idea in ES5 that classes are simply functions that return an object. Hooking up inheritance structure is a complete PITA, but conceptually the design is really clean. Even the idea that objects are simply hashes and that methods are simply functions in a hash is really nice. Even the weird this pointer is at least consistent (despite being practically useless).
Where ES5 gets its bad reputation is in type/data coercion (which it shouldn't do at all IMHO, and it certainly shouldn't do it the way it does it). It also has a truly awful standard library -- to the point where most experienced developers simply avoid it! My main other problem with ES5 is that it is overly verbose, but this is something I feel that is shared with Ruby in many ways.
IMHO, use of a transpiler is just a good idea with ES5 because while the core of the language is excellent, the stuff surrounding it is full of pitfalls. I personally like CoffeeScript quite a lot and honestly prefer writing CS to Ruby. Typescript seems like it is also quite nice, though I haven't used it. Lately I've been playing with Purescript and while it is legitimately a different language compiled into JS, I really enjoy reading the compiled JS output, because it often compiles into something very elegant.
Conclusion: Ruby is fine, but ES5 is just a lot more elegant internally and it is much easier for me to use it intelligently to produce nice code. Ruby has a much better standard library, but language features are bolted on without them being driven by an internal design. Basically, I think they think "Hey, this would be a convenient syntax. Let's write the C code to make that work." without really evaluating whether there is any internal consistency. Some people may actually consider that a plus, but I prefer simpler languages. Note that I feel that in many ways ES6 is wandering over in this direction and I am somewhat disappointed with it. I was happy you specified ES5 in your question, because a similar question about ES6 would have been harder for me to answer.
I completely agree on one aspect, anywhere I go, the kitchen sink is missing. You want to compress responses? well, there is an npm / jar / pip library for that. Want to have ORM? just npm / pip / "your package manager here" and you are done.
You can say a lot about Rails but I like the idea that everything I commonly need as a web developer is most likely already in the framework, and there is usually a best practice way to do things. Options are great, but moving out of plumbing and into generating value to customers is still having a value.
If you don't like opinionated, batteries included solutions then Rails is not for you.
However there are other solutions that kind-of cloned some aspects of Rails. Playframework (Scala has a lot more similarities to Ruby IMHO than to Java, at least in philosophy). Also Spring Boot or JHipster (Spring boot + Yeoman - super opinionated)
Maybe Rails has changed from when I last used it five years ago, but I dealt with many of the issues DHH makes against other technology.
> That people spent hours, if not days, just setting up the skeletons. The basic build configurations.
I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again.
> The vast majority of activity today is for yet another option on the a la carte menu.
Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.
Maybe I worked on a bad project. Maybe I didn't get it. Maybe it was a growing pain that has passed. Rails was a pain in the ass to get to work. The ORM was cool, but did it save me time or mistakes from writing SQL - no.
I would love other people's opinions who have stuck with Rails.
For many years I tried to install Rails in my computer and it just refused to play well with the installation of MySQL on my Mac. I looked on SO and tried some CLI commands and configurations that I could barely understand for a couple of hours and then, when nothing worked, I just stopped and went back to CakePHP (which I used to love). I did this like every six months for maybe 5 years and then I became mostly a front end developer and I stopped caring. Nowadays with most of my projects there's somebody providing me with a REST API and I don't care what they are using to generate it.
>>Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.
You misunderstood DHH's point. He's talking about well-integrated defaults. He isn't talking about preventing people from using other modules if they choose to do so.
I mean, if your developers want to try the hot new thing every week, Rails isn't the problem. That much should be obvious.
> I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again.
I used to have this problem too -- more so in the early days of asset pipeline. Mostly when trying to use some client side framework. Rails is working on (or maybe already available, I'm not sure) yarn/webpack support.
> Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.
Replacing the batteries which are included can be painful at times. If you want to use the new hotness in Rails, it comes at a price of extra work getting it working... but it only seems painful when comparing to the included batteries -- they just work. Support for different test frameworks, orms, templating languages are pretty good anymore though and are easier to swap out.
You'll definitely have a better experience with Rails if you forego the desire to run the latest and greatest and just use what Rails already has.
Until a new point release comes out and everyone forgets about the one you're running. Then you get to find out how much of your code you'll need to rewrite so it'll run with the Rails chefs' wild new menu. And there's no point even trying with an app written for an earlier major version. Just give up now, because the whole ocean's been boiled and recondensed since then, and now occupies but few of the basins it once did.
Granted, it's been a couple years since I dealt with any Rails apps. That's in large part by design, because every Rails app has a relatively high curation cost just to keep it up to date with the latest and greatest, and you have to do that if you want to be able to add features or usefully maintain anything without undue agony, because the Rails community has the collective memory of a goldfish and even less interest in maintaining continuity with the past.
I get that that's the big selling point, the drum DHH and his fans never stop beating: "Rails is omakase." This is a fundamentally broken metaphor, because sushi is dead by the time it gets to you, and all you have to do with it is eat it; the history of the ingredients is of little consequence. Would that software were so simple.
> Until a new point release comes out and everyone forgets about the one you're running
This is definitely a pain you'll feel with rails, and any other combination of software pieces which you bring together.
For what it's worth, within the last month, I've touched rails 3.2, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, and 5.0.1 apps which are running in production. It's possible to maintain these apps on old releases, but the idea of never upgrading will be painful in the end.
It's worse in Rails because of the rate of change and the near-total lack of interest in backwards compatibility. Granted that the change in question often improves Rails' performance or stability, but that so much scope seems to go on existing for such improvements is in itself concerning, and the larger question, of whether it would be wiser to instead invest in a less volatile and more stable platform, remains valid.
I admire the way DHH writes .. confident and persuasive.
However, I'd just like to point out that in the same span of time JavaEE has undergone significant simplification (omakase API standards, anyone ;)) and if you check out the work of Adam Bien, you'll quickly find old myths of bloated memory consumption and fiddly XML configuration debunked.
Java is also lucky to have a parallel full-featured stack in the Spring ecosystem. Projects like JHipster do an opinionated take on how to wire things up and take you to quickly to orbit.
So basically, I disagree with DHH that there is "Very little activity in integrated solutions."
I took his comment about "very little activity in integrated solutions" to mean "[in the JavaScript world]" but maybe that's not what he meant.
I do think that's pretty true of the JS ecosystem though. There are things like Sails, but most of the "new" stuff that comes out is build systems, tools, small libraries, and view libraries.
As to why... it's anyone's guess.
My guess is that making a full-stack opinionated framework like Rails is a big undertaking, and most people are focused on what they see as "quick wins" -- solutions to the obvious surface-level pains like "npm is slow" and "making forms with React is hard" that can gain traction quickly and rise to stardom on Github.
Maybe this is cynical to mention, but fame and recognition (and maybe interesting job offers) seem to be a big driving force behind the constant influx of new and better JS libraries/tools.
I think its because recreating rails in javascript just doesn't make sense in the current ecosystem. Either you are rewriting stuff like express from scratch (and why are you doing that?), or you're building on top of those modules and adding configuration conventions and scripts, in which case, congratulations, you've just written Sails.
When Rails first got started, ruby didn't have anything close to the ecosystem that JS enjoys today, so DHH et al. had to write most of the individual components themselves, with the intention of making them all work together.
So in my view, its similar to how Humans and Gorillas evolved from a common ancestor, but you won't see Gorillas becoming Human anytime soon.
I think you're right that Rails basically built up the Ruby ecosystem around itself, whereas most of the JS libraries are just riding the wave started by... Node and NPM, I guess? It's much more fragmented.
> ...or you're building on top of those modules and adding configuration conventions and scripts, in which case, congratulations, you've just written Sails.
This doesn't jive with a lot of what's been done in the JS community, at least frontend anyway. There are a TON of libraries that already had perfectly good implementations, where people just decided to reinvent the wheel because they "couldn't find any X library that did what they needed." (see: anything to do with forms)
Backend too, though. There's Express, Koa, Hapi, and more. They all basically do the same thing.
Maybe it's just a difference in mindsets -- maybe JS devs prefer light libraries they can cobble together vs. kitchen-sink frameworks? But then there's the counter-example of the popular frontend frameworks (Angular 1/2, Ember), so I'm not so sure that applies universally either.
Personally I think Sails is pretty cool in it's own right. As far as websockets go I feel like that is one area where Sails makes things dead simple and I've not been amazed by the overcomplicated Rails 5 implementation of websockets.
That said, I don't see Sails gaining a ton of traction even though it's been around for quite some time yet, and with it's security settings and beta status I don't feel great about building production apps with it yet.
I certainly like sails, and can't levy too much criticism against it (except its ORM left quite a bit to be desired, although I haven't looked at it recently). I'm only asserting that it will never be Rails, partially because of how and when each respective framework came to be.
I thought that was a strange claim, too (though if it was just about js, that would make more sense), especially given Elixir /Phoenix - which seems like an up-and-coming framework very much in the Rails mold.
So, I have seen rails code and I did not fall in love with the code. Instead what I saw just black magic and all sorts of conventions. Reminded me of perl. You have to invest a lot of time knowing all the magic stuff.
There isn't much black magic. Most of it is pretty sane naming conventions which could be OK in any sw project, plus database schema autodiscovery. The bonus is increased maintainability.
They are talking about adding some optional type inference in Ruby 3.0. See the rejection comments of https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9999
This is the most stong typing I'll accept for Ruby. There are plenty of other languages if strong typing is important for a project. They usually look bad (not because of strong typing) but if one really needs them...
As someone who is just learning Rails [1], I can definitely empathise with the "black magic" comment.
Some of the stuff it does is pretty much voodoo to me at this point. But - it's voodoo that makes me think - even say out loud to myself, sometimes - "wow". I can see how it's amazing that it does what it does with so little code. I can see how this is an enormous benefit to getting a project up and running. I can see how it'll potentially save me hours and hours of configuration.
That's a great benefit, but it comes at the cost of understanding. What exactly is that line of voodoo doing? I dunno. How do I troubleshoot it if it doesn't work? I dunno. Like, I have no idea.
[1]: As the first real "language" I'm trying to actually properly learn, so take my comments in that context. I am not already an experienced coder. I want to be able to knock up little projects, proofs of concept, in a reasonable amount of time. Rails, to me, seems like the framework that will allow me to do that. We'll see.
newsat13 wasn't complaining about using conventions. newsat13 was complaining about how Rails uses black magic with conventions.
I can't speak to Rails, but I've worked in other codebases that used reflection to dynamically attach different pieces of code together. It was hard to trace code because I couldn't do a search for the value being generated nor could I use the static analysis to find the value. I had to manually trace through the whole stack to find the bit of reflection that was generating a value.
I've never worked in a codebase like that, but in all my years of helping people with Ruby and Rails I've concluded that reflection is a code smell. It's one of those things that is taught in CS and winds up appearing where conventions might not have been immediately apparent, a fallback to training.
> So, I have seen rails code and I did not fall in love with the code. Instead what I saw just black magic and all sorts of conventions.
Right, so clearly Rails is not for you. No harm no foul.
This is essentially the point of rails, that I as an engineer don't care enough about those details, because I need to get something working quickly. if it gets to a point where it matters (because it actually does, say, when you're trying to scale) you can invest the time to learn how it all works and either improve it or say ... "you know what, I think we should ditch this entire thing"
Maybe a more relevant question is whether Rails is worth learning if you're looking for a job. Searching Indeed.com's API by title, which removes duplicates, there are currently 133 Rails jobs in the USA compared with 763 PHP (excl. WP, Drupal etc.) and 467 Node.js. In the UK there are 104 Rails jobs compared with 1013 PHP (excl. WP, Drupal etc.) and 230 Node.js. However, if you deleve deeper it turns out that half of the Rails jobs are in London. Outside the capital there are 22 PHP jobs to every Rails job (35 including WP, Drupal etc.) and 3 Node.js jobs to every Rails job so it would appear that unless you have a particular preference for the Ruby language Rails is not a good bet in today's job market.
Have you looked at Laravel recently? With Vue.js integrated into the framework and adopting the best bits of Rails I'd say it's looking in better shape than Rails right now.
I don't think indeed.com is representative of the market, many rails jobs aren't even online.
Besides, if for 133 rails jobs and 763 PHP jobs there are 60 and 1500 rails and PHP candidates (respectively,) you're clearly better off choosing rails.
That's not very scientific until you can establish that Rails jobs are more likely to be posted offline than PHP jobs. I don't see any evidence for this.
I have been thinking of rails lately. I used both Rails and Merb way back when, but for many years now I have just used Ruby + Sinatra.
I wish that I had a more complex web app to do because it would be fun to get reacquainted with Rails. That probably won't happen since I have been going it the opposite direction, having updated a few Sinatra and PHP sites to be 100% static, and using cloud storage and CDNs.
If you are familiar with Sinatra, have you checked our Padrino [0] ?? Padrino gives you a lot of the Rails goodies without too much bulk added.
I've developed and deployed several 'real world' web apps in Padrino now. I looked at Rails in the early days, but for some reason could never really get to grips with it (probably because it was too opinionated for me). Sinatra/Padrino's DSL methodology seemed to sit better with me, and I ran with it.
Ember.js attempts to do what the front-end what Rails has done for server-side application development. Worth a look, if you're trying to choose between React / Angular / something else.
The only thing I'd really take much issue with is the "provides great defaults" statement made in passing. There are several things that are defaulted more to what I'd call "lowest common denominator" than "great." For example, sessions.
This a great point that gets to the heart of the problem with the premise of a full-stack framework. Defaults end up more "good enough" rather than "great"
But a collection of consistently good enough components is better than tying together two dozen different things of wildly different quality and conventions.
I hear this a lot about Django. The ORM is really good but "not as good as SQLAlchemy". The templates are great but "Jinja is better".
The thing is that as an engineer I value that the components are incremental improvements with sane defaults where change is deliberate and the benefits of what I'm missing out on are truly, honestly irrelevant. There's really very few times where I said to myself, "Oh of only my templating language had better support for these idioms". I just write a decent workaround because I've been using the same tool for years and it's maintainable and the total number of workarounds is so small that there are no good reasons to switch to an alternative even in the long term.
This is much better than the alternative of looking for 5 alternatives for the same component, discarding the first 3, using one for a month until I find it has fatal flaws, and finally settling for the last one.
Once one critical component in the framework is no longer good enough it can be very difficult to upgrade.
Frameworks aggregate many dependencies. Managing the dependencies that deliver value while ignoring those that are irrelevant can net out as more productive.
This article might be helpful: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/HumaneInterface.html. I use Ruby occasionally only, but agree with DHH's point. At least compared to the languages I knew before I learned Ruby, I found it to be designed to be aesthetically pleasing to humans. This might be even be the cause for the parse ambiguities.
Thanks! I agree Ruby looks to be far user-friendly in this context.
Just to add, my work revolves around the JVM ecosystem, but mostly in Scala and some Kotlin... Both already provide a nicer interface for Java :) e.g. in the context of collections both have `list.head` or `list.first` and `list.last`.
Sorry, but I've really got no idea what you're saying here. What's the connection between users having many devices and the monolithic architecture bit?
There was a moment in web development where a single "full-stack framework" was possible, that moment has passed, and that moment was more rare and unique than it seemed at the time. The future seems to be more about lambda functions[1], api gateways, and many native clients.
Quoting DHH, the Rails pitch was use Ruby for everything:
> The core premise of Rails remains in many ways as controversial today as it was when it premiered. That by formalizing conventions, eliminating valueless choices, and offering a full-stack framework that provides great defaults for anyone who wants to create a complete application, we can make dramatic strides of productivity.
That premise is irrelevant today. A complete application today isn't just a website. It's a website, a phone app, a car app, a TV, a kiosk, a conversational bot, etc. Choosing even the highest common denominator across all those platforms means eliminating unique opportunities to delight the user.
If now the premise of Rails is that it's a great way to generate JSON on the server, sure but that's a fraction of the stack. The selling point for Rails is now simply an aesthetic choice between Javascript and Ruby. DHH admits as much with his closing argument:
> Just look at some code. I dare you not to fall in love.
Since the core premise of Rails remains full-stack, plugins at best are a cycle behind innovation. Conventions have to be explored elsewhere before they can be formalized, and before choices can be exposed as valueless. At worse, plugins are multiple cycles behind innovation due to pointless infighting.
This just seems way too slow, I'd rather get my hands dirty today.
[1] or process containers, let's not get bogged down in vendor details.
Your first quotation is something you're seriously misreading, I think. It's not about using Ruby for everything. It's about not spending time on minor decisions that don't affect the outcomes you're pursuing. And that's what that quote says – nothing about Ruby; everything about pruning down the pointless decisions you need to make as a developer.
> A complete application today isn't just a website. It's a website, a phone app, a car app, a TV, a kiosk, a conversational bot, etc.
I disagree pretty strongly with that. A complete application can be any one of those things. Sure, if you have a need for all of those at once, then Rails isn't going to be your one and only tool. But it could still well be the tool for your complete web application, and at the same time your API server for (some/all) of the other tools.
> DHH admits as much with his closing argument
No, he says that Ruby's beauty is an additional reason to use it. It's hardly an admission that it's all that differentiates Rails from other options.
Ok but then we are talking about Java, .NET and JavaScript.
They all more or less work on many more devices than Ruby but at some points are so huge and complex and do not perform the same on all of these devices that you still kinda want to pick a specific technology.
Hell Ruby has RubyMotion that allows you to write native apps.
If he really believed that, then the thing todo would be to re-write rails to run on top of node. Then he'd have a runtime that spanned nearly every possible use case and device.
Sticking with Ruby betrays that aesthetics are really the core premise of Rails, rather than aspirations of being the one framework to link all run times and in the darkness bind them.
Why on earth is Node considered the default for concurrency with its shitty single-threaded callback execution model? Anyone switching from Rails for improved concurrency would surely be better advised to choose Elixir?
Was referencing the run-time's viability on devices as small as a Beagle Bone micro controller, a mobile app, up to a backend service, etc.
There's an attractive opportunity for code reuse.
Have a preference for process pools over thread pools so don't mind the execution model. Would not be surprised that some applications are better served by other backends like akka etc. Elixir is on my list to learn.
That does of course play into the position that a great "full stack" framework is a thing of the past.
We use a distributed architecture in clojure and python where I work, but it has its own downsides, and for a lot of people monoliths are a much better solution.
There's a separate argument to be had about single process vs multi process backends, but that gets away from the core premise of Rails. Part of that premise included opinions and defaults about client-side development.
Rails was unique in its time in that it shipped with solid client-side DOM manipulation (prototype.js). It supplied a "full-stack" framework that made it easy to build a dynamic, AJAX Ux.
But lately the "best practices" in the node ecosystem move so fast that any default may soon be outdated. What would today's javascript Ux best practice be? Vue.js? React? Angular? Which state management solution is "best" ? Which CSS framework is "best" ?
Any choice you make will be out of date by the time you ship. There's a ton of activity. It's a decision that belongs on the project, not the framework.
> You get to use Ruby, which, even in a world that has rediscovered the benefits of functional programming and immutability, remains the most extraordinarily beautiful and luxurious language I’ve yet to encounter.
He's saying there are other beautiful paradigms - especially of the FP variety.
However, Ruby is really, really damn elegant.
What stack do you recommend if not rails for a person that dislikes JavaScript (well rather ecosystem than the language / syntax itself) ?
I love Rails and Ruby do not take me wrong but I am not sure if the sole existence of Rails can make Ruby relevant in 2017.
In terms of jobs prospects and similarity to Rails/Ruby what do you guys recommend ?
Java ?
If I read your comment correctly, I believe you are suggesting that backends will provide APIs, which would leave us with the MC in MVC, the controller is still needed to map data structures to API endpoints.
My question to you is this: why do you believe that? I think we have all witnessed a growth in popularity in front-end MVC frameworks, but are they the correct solution to all problems?
> the controller is still needed to map data structures to API endpoints.
I mean, kind of. You don't really need much controller logic most of the time anymore. Last Rails backend I wrote probably involved personally writing a few lines of code here and there. Generally, I'm just pushing a JSON object back and forth. Auth and emails can just be 3rd party. The vast majority of controller type behavior ends up client side at this point. Partly, because its way simpler to scale with you push as much processing to the client as you can. Also, look at something like Firebase or Hoodie as examples of simple stores that require no backend logic.
Its not that Rails and Symfony are useless, I use them all the time, its just that they are kind of dated concepts. Heck even Wordpress solves a specific problem on the backend enough to be useful sometimes. That said Drupal at this point is such a dated concept(superseded by things like Rails and Symfony many years ago) that is should no longer be used.
Well, I don't think anyone's taking much notice of that advice if you go by job stats. Drupal is enjoying tremendous adoption and if you look at Drupal 8 code you'll discover it is built on Symfony components.
Front-end MVC frameworks are deployed and run client-side. Their emergence is a supporting point to the argument that the view is migrating away from the web server and onto the client device(s).
I can imagine more and more web apps as frontends to multiple services of other companies, but there is still space for custom backends. I've got a customer that is developing its company around a custom ERP (under development) because he says there is nothing out there that can interface the systems he has to exchange data with. Of course sooner or later somebody will provide those services, using backend technologies.
There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you, but I want nothing to do with either, and do not have problems that those are meant to solve. I love ruby, and I love rails.
DHH regularly sounds the drum of rationality - in a community at large of idealists and extremists. He is the reason I got into programming, and constantly serves to remind me that what I'm doing is, in fact, perfectly fine; and that everyone else puts up with a lot of nonsense for no great reason.
There are other frameworks out there, but you'd be hard pressed to find one with a leader that has such a sense of direction and reason for why the framework does what it does, and does not.