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Weird situation with this and Sails right now. Sails.js development has basically stagnated in the past year, and many people in the community believe Balderda

Weird situation with this and Sails right now. Sails.js development has basically stagnated in the past year, and many people in the community believe Balderdash, the company behind it, aren't giving it the attention it deserves (they have a few new projects they're working on). Travis Webb and his team behind Trails were kicked out of Balderdash (not clear if fired from the company or just removed from GitHub group), and Travis blames Mike from Balderdash for doing it as a political move to keep control. Mike has said very little publicly about it, apparently not wanting to stir up more drama. Trails seems to be an attempt at achieving what Sails has achieved (a full-stack modern MVC framework in node) with newer tools (ES6, I think Koa by default instead of Express, etc) and perhaps more modularity. I think it's an ambitious project with good goals, but it will be a while before it will be stable and ready to use. And if it does reach that point, it's still susceptible to what's hurting Sails right now (a larger community than your developers can handle, de-prioritization, politics...). Hopefully this turns out like the node / io.js split and is, in the end, positive for the ecosystem in some way.

sotojuan 11y ago
> Hopefully this turns out like the node / io.js split and is, in the end, positive for the ecosystem in some way. I agree. I commented earlier that the Node community seems to prefer small modules over Rails-like frameworks, but I think a solid web framework would be good for Node adoption by people who prefer them and beginners.
- traviswebb 11y ago
  Hopefully. We've actually seen some (mostly superficial) activity in Sails recently, which is surprising and encouraging. Trails is actually much more modular than Sails. The goal is the same -- to make your life easier -- and the conventions are rails-like (indeed, compatible wiyh Sails) but the technical design is completely different and actually quite a bit more "node-like". Keep in mind that Trails is not a fork, but a Sails-compatible re-write. So there's no upstream code-level reconciliation that can happen, but I'm sure both projects can coexist and compete in the framework market on their merits.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    > Keep in mind that Trails is not a fork, but a Sails-compatible re-write. So there's no upstream code-level reconciliation that can happen, but I'm sure both projects can coexist and compete in the framework market on their merits. The same could have been said of Rails and Merb back in the day, but they eventually combined efforts, and rolled the concepts that people liked from Merb back into Rails. It wasn't a case of just copying the code over, but it still allowed proving the ideas in the real world.
    - nodenodenode 11y ago
      The key difference being that the Rails and Merb teams were full of great engineers, and that Merb was mostly meant to solve some specific Rails pain points. Native english speakers on the Merb team also probably could avoid using "actually" three times in two sentences. The Trails project seems like a lot of flash and "saying the right things" with personal enmity. for now there's no reason to expect it to be a better project than SailsJS in any way. The trailpack abstraction ... amateur hour, or cynically, focus on branding. Don't use these projects that are just designed to run consulting shops, seriously! I mean come on, they're actually flying aorund the country to user groups to market the thing ... lol.
      - traviswebb 11y ago
        > for now there's no reason to expect it to be a better project than SailsJS in any way "nodenodenode" account created 12 hours ago just to write this comment. I wonder who this is...
        mikermcneil 11y ago
        Certainly you're not alleging that I created that account to write that comment? Not only do I not have time for that kind of dishonesty, Sails was created while I was running one of those "kind of consulting shops". Please leave me and my team alone.
stephengoodwin 11y ago
The last time I checked in on Sails.js about 9 months ago, Mike McNeil, Cody Stoltman, and Scott Gress had just gotten back from YC for Treeline (http://treeline.io http://treeline.io).[1] [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-treeline-company https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-treeline-company
- traviswebb 11y ago
  They are still working on Treeline full-time as far as I know, and for the foreseeable future.
- mikermcneil 11y ago
  We are working on Treeline, a tool that compiles Sails.js apps. Our backend is running on Sails.js in production. Fortunately, Travis did not change the Crunchbase page for Treeline. However, he did deface the Crunchbase pages for Sails, Waterline, Balderdash, and me personally (I've since reverted them).
  - traviswebb 11y ago
    I added them as products to the "Balderdash" company. I think we have different definitions of "deface".
traviswebb 11y ago
It will be awhile before it's fully production-ready of course, but we'll begin using it internally for developing new projects after our 1.0-beta release in February. One note: we're using Hapi by default, but koa and express4 will be supported as well. This is part of our modularity difference.
- rattray 11y ago
  Can you please mention these things on the README?
  - nodenodenode 11y ago
    But that would discourage developers adopting the framework with an expectation of usability, who once invested will have no choice but to fix the project's bugs. This is a notable feature of the JS world nowadays: You never get to know when a project is stable, it just "is."
- WhitneyLand 11y ago
  Why Hapi?

sotojuan 11y ago

> Hopefully this turns out like the node / io.js split and is, in the end, positive for the ecosystem in some way. I agree. I commented earlier that the Node community seems to prefer small modules over Rails-like frameworks, but I think a solid web framework would be good for Node adoption by people who prefer them and beginners.

traviswebb 11y ago
Hopefully. We've actually seen some (mostly superficial) activity in Sails recently, which is surprising and encouraging. Trails is actually much more modular than Sails. The goal is the same -- to make your life easier -- and the conventions are rails-like (indeed, compatible wiyh Sails) but the technical design is completely different and actually quite a bit more "node-like". Keep in mind that Trails is not a fork, but a Sails-compatible re-write. So there's no upstream code-level reconciliation that can happen, but I'm sure both projects can coexist and compete in the framework market on their merits.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  > Keep in mind that Trails is not a fork, but a Sails-compatible re-write. So there's no upstream code-level reconciliation that can happen, but I'm sure both projects can coexist and compete in the framework market on their merits. The same could have been said of Rails and Merb back in the day, but they eventually combined efforts, and rolled the concepts that people liked from Merb back into Rails. It wasn't a case of just copying the code over, but it still allowed proving the ideas in the real world.
  - nodenodenode 11y ago
    The key difference being that the Rails and Merb teams were full of great engineers, and that Merb was mostly meant to solve some specific Rails pain points. Native english speakers on the Merb team also probably could avoid using "actually" three times in two sentences. The Trails project seems like a lot of flash and "saying the right things" with personal enmity. for now there's no reason to expect it to be a better project than SailsJS in any way. The trailpack abstraction ... amateur hour, or cynically, focus on branding. Don't use these projects that are just designed to run consulting shops, seriously! I mean come on, they're actually flying aorund the country to user groups to market the thing ... lol.
    - traviswebb 11y ago
      > for now there's no reason to expect it to be a better project than SailsJS in any way "nodenodenode" account created 12 hours ago just to write this comment. I wonder who this is...
      - mikermcneil 11y ago
        Certainly you're not alleging that I created that account to write that comment? Not only do I not have time for that kind of dishonesty, Sails was created while I was running one of those "kind of consulting shops". Please leave me and my team alone.

stephengoodwin 11y ago

The last time I checked in on Sails.js about 9 months ago, Mike McNeil, Cody Stoltman, and Scott Gress had just gotten back from YC for Treeline (http://treeline.io http://treeline.io).[1] [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-treeline-company https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/the-treeline-company

traviswebb 11y ago
They are still working on Treeline full-time as far as I know, and for the foreseeable future.
mikermcneil 11y ago
We are working on Treeline, a tool that compiles Sails.js apps. Our backend is running on Sails.js in production. Fortunately, Travis did not change the Crunchbase page for Treeline. However, he did deface the Crunchbase pages for Sails, Waterline, Balderdash, and me personally (I've since reverted them).
- traviswebb 11y ago
  I added them as products to the "Balderdash" company. I think we have different definitions of "deface".

traviswebb 11y ago

It will be awhile before it's fully production-ready of course, but we'll begin using it internally for developing new projects after our 1.0-beta release in February. One note: we're using Hapi by default, but koa and express4 will be supported as well. This is part of our modularity difference.

rattray 11y ago
Can you please mention these things on the README?
- nodenodenode 11y ago
  But that would discourage developers adopting the framework with an expectation of usability, who once invested will have no choice but to fix the project's bugs. This is a notable feature of the JS world nowadays: You never get to know when a project is stable, it just "is."
WhitneyLand 11y ago
Why Hapi?