[wapz]

I've talked to several back-end engineers recently and none of them recommended Rails because of the 'magic.' They have recommended Node w/express (most popular) followed by Django and for me personally (small project) they recommended Laravel.

[vinceguidry]

I don't want to get too deep into apologism here, but that's a common complaint by back-end guys who don't like the front-end. Rails is the solution for the solo developer or small team, the "magic" really helps in these scenarios.

If your project is big enough to require the skills of an experienced back-end guy, then you're so far past the learning stage that you might as well be in your rocking chair screaming at the neighbor kids.

[wapz]

Oh don't worry I'm not trying to defend the positions of those I talked to. I started learning Laravel for a small project I'm doing (I wrote some native iOS and Android apps and want to make a web interface for users to get their data). Do you recommend rails for that? I know close to no web (just basic html/css/javascript).

[vinceguidry]

Rails works great for that.

Rails works great for every web task except the very big and the very small. Very small being anything you'd want to put on a Raspberry Pi.

The learning curve is reasonable, and can be made easier if you get the basics of both Ruby and MVC down by using a simpler Ruby framework like Sinatra to build out a few toy apps before jumping into Rails. Once you feel like you need more out of a framework than Sinatra can give, it's time to switch to Rails.

Ruby and the web go together like Captain and Coke.

[wapz]

Haha okay thanks for your advice. I'll definitely look into Ruby before building anything, then. Sounds like Sinatra might be better for me to start with if it's the simpler of the two.

[mcbetz]

Laravel is just fine for that job. If you do not have a strong reason to change, keep on learning. It has an excellent documentation, has a great ecosystem (email, search, background jobs) that you have to assemble yourself with lightweight tools such as Sinatra or Flask (Python). For a beginner the complexity of tools is overwhelming, Laravel makes smart decisions for you. Plus, Laracasts.com is by far the best learning resource I know for any language.