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by jfim 2179 days ago
Is there even a good alternative to Rails?

As far as I know, it's still the best option there is for quickly building a MVP on the web if one isn't building a SPA.

2 comments

Is Rails quicker and easier than, say, Django? Sure. Is it quicker and easier by enough to make it worth having another language in your stack? Not really, IME.
Laravel[1] is pretty close, and PHP has some big advantages over Ruby for performance and deployment.

If you had told me 5 years ago that I'd be recommending PHP as an alternative vs. RoR I wouldn't have believed you, but the PHP world has improved in ways that I wouldn't have thought possible.

[1] https://laravel.com/

Laravel may be based on the idea of Rails but in terms of programmer happiness it doesn't come close. A typical file of idiomatic PHP code reads like stodgy old Java and contains about 60% blank lines and doc comments as recommended by PSRs. Rails, by contrast, is elegantly concise and has fantastic metaprogramming.