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by thibaut_barrere 4071 days ago
I've worked (as a freelancer) on a number of apps recently using Rails for the "front back-end" and either Erlang or Go for the "back back-end" and it's been working great.

Rails works great for things like authentication, creating a nice and maintainable UI, handling billing code, sending emails, managing the database schema, and all the web related stuff.

Erlang and Go work nicely for all the "heavy work", think sending tens of million of push notifications quickly, crunching data etc.

They can communicate using a shared, Rails-maintained database, and things like Redis to trigger updates or orders.

You can even do Erlang-backend processing of Sidekiq payloads, pushed from the Rails side etc.

All in all: use each tool for its own strengths.
1 comments
aikah 4071 days ago
> Rails works great for things like authentication, creating a nice and maintainable UI, handling billing code, sending emails, managing the database schema, and all the web related stuff.

Nothing that Go cannot do. The only difference between Go/web and Rails is the maturity of the libraries.

Of course Go libs are way less mature for various "business tasks".

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thibaut_barrere 4071 days ago
You can do that in Go, yet like pointed out in [1], it tends to take more effort (well, this has been my experience at least).

But well: do what works for you, really :-) I'm not commenting to persuade you, I'm just sharing one data point.

[1] http://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2014/atlas/

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aikah 4071 days ago
Did you write Gopher academy (fellow french?) ?
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thibaut_barrere 4071 days ago
No I didn't! Yet I felt exactly the same. Sorry if my message was confusing :-) (I'm french indeed).
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PopsiclePete 4071 days ago
Everything can be done in Go, sure, but at least the current direction of Go is to provide small reusable libraries, not frameworks. And there's a huge difference between the two.

I don't like frameworks like RoR or ASP.NET MVC. Too much magic. Things break in weird places. They're slow. But they give programmers some kind of safe, happy sandbox that hides the "scary" web.

It's a whole different philosophy I think. Almost every week I see a new rubyists on golang-nuts looking for the "RoR equivalent" in Go-land.

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matthewmacleod 4071 days ago
It's also 'nothing that C cannot do', but we still don't generally find it being used for such!

I've tried writing web front-ends in Go. It's a fiddly pain in the arse, and the benefits aren't really obvious. If it works for your situation then use it, but IME they're targeted at different problem domains.

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