4 ms·

I'm learning Rails right now and this isn't the first time I heard how slow RoR can be. Hell, there's a whole site answering the "Can rails scale?" question (ht

I'm learning Rails right now and this isn't the first time I heard how slow RoR can be. Hell, there's a whole site answering the "Can rails scale?" question (http://canrailsscale.com/ http://canrailsscale.com/). A lot of what Rails does, and even the little things, like naming conventions in ActiveRecord, intuitively make sense to me. If RoR ever does expire because another language/framework displaces it (maybe Elixir/Phoenix?) or because of poor/no support from a big company, I wouldn't look at it as a waste of time. Overall, I'm seeing a tried-and-true method of creating web applications and I'm enjoying it so far. RoR can still get you where you need to go and fast, which is what you need when starting out. And if you ever find yourself in the same situation as Twitter, then you can make the switch...or better yet, improve on Ruby and give back to the Ruby community.

xentronium 11y ago
Rails eliminates a lot of choice and this is a huge deal. Hooking up db and setting rake tasks migrations for sinatra project might feel novel the first time you do it, but not really after that. Rails can feel somewhat bloated, but it has a lot of functionality out of the box done transparently: generators, ORM and migrations, xss protection, templating, assets compilation, testing, configuration and naming conventions. It's been a huge shock to me to see that a more modern framework on a more modern platform, express.js on node.js, has such a tiny subset of features we had in rails like 8 years ago. Granted, it's more like sinatra rather than rails, but nonetheless disappointing — what do all these people find in express that they couldn't have before.
- nemild 11y ago
  Rails, Sinatra, Express developer here - each tool has different characteristics that make it better for some things and worse for others. If I wanted something with a high throughput of simple requests (like a chat server) or realtime responses using websockets, I'd typically go with a Node.JS inspired framework like Express. But as this thread states, developer productivity can't be overstated, if the shipped code does what is needed.

xentronium 11y ago

Rails eliminates a lot of choice and this is a huge deal. Hooking up db and setting rake tasks migrations for sinatra project might feel novel the first time you do it, but not really after that. Rails can feel somewhat bloated, but it has a lot of functionality out of the box done transparently: generators, ORM and migrations, xss protection, templating, assets compilation, testing, configuration and naming conventions. It's been a huge shock to me to see that a more modern framework on a more modern platform, express.js on node.js, has such a tiny subset of features we had in rails like 8 years ago. Granted, it's more like sinatra rather than rails, but nonetheless disappointing — what do all these people find in express that they couldn't have before.

nemild 11y ago
Rails, Sinatra, Express developer here - each tool has different characteristics that make it better for some things and worse for others. If I wanted something with a high throughput of simple requests (like a chat server) or realtime responses using websockets, I'd typically go with a Node.JS inspired framework like Express. But as this thread states, developer productivity can't be overstated, if the shipped code does what is needed.