4 ms·

Once you start shipping to production you care far less about "speed of development" and "prototyping things" and more about "does this actually work". Don't g

Once you start shipping to production you care far less about "speed of development" and "prototyping things" and more about "does this actually work". Don't get me wrong, Sails might be very good for prototyping something, but I could recommend it only if your only goal was to prototype something.

kevinob11 11y ago
Fair enough, though I do have some experience with shipping to production. I do have quite a few other issues with sails and waterline (ORM). Waterline provided lifecycle hooks, but limited their power and had poor documentation on extending them. Same for sails core itself, it had hooks for writing modules and extensions, but no one outside of the core team knew well how to use them. As for migrations I ended up doing all of my own migrations with knex, I'd love to see knex or sequelize be the core of a new ORM, rather than a quickly cobbled together sql module. Trails has promised something better on a lot of these fronts through modularity, I hope they deliver.
- clay_to_n 11y ago
  Lack of documentation has probably been my biggest gripe with Sails. The documentation on their website was broken for almost a year ("but it's on github! Go find it there"). They had a Getting Started "Sailscasts" series that was helpful, and then they released the beginning of the V2 videos (using a SPA w/ Angular), but only got three videos in.
  - sgress454 11y ago
    What's broken on the website? All the docs on http://sailsjs.org/ http://sailsjs.org/ work for me.
    - clay_to_n 11y ago
      It works now. It didn't for most of 2015. The index page would send you to broken pages (but if you went to GitHub you could find the info).
      - mikermcneil 11y ago
        Thanks for following up, Clay. Sorry sailsjs.org caused trouble for you last year. You're right-- fixing SEO permalinks in our docs (i.e. converting sailsjs.org from an SPA to a site w/ server-rendered views) was a pretty slow and involved process. This was due in part to the fact that we switched to deeply-nested navigation in the docs, but also because of the sheer number of old links we had to maintain from two different past versions of the website. We weren't able to preserve them all, but we did our best to maintain the functionality of as many legacy hashbang (`#!`) and Angular-style (`/#/`) links as we could. I'm glad to hear the doc links are working for you now. We also owe Kevin Burke from Shyp a big thank you for drawing our attention to the SEO problem in the first place. Regardless of where Shyp goes with their tech stack long term, it has been immensely helpful to learn from Kevin's experiences using the framework there. Those lessons have already impacted the direction of Sails, and will continue to influence its future development. On the subject of documentation, I wanted to share two other resources from 2015, in case either of them might be helpful for you: The first is a free Sails course on Platzi (https://courses.platzi.com/courses/develop-apps-sails-js/ https://courses.platzi.com/courses/develop-apps-sails-js/). It covers best practices for authentication, blueprints vs. custom actions, and multi-instance deployment to Heroku, and contains some great Q&A. The second is "Sails.js in Action" (https://www.manning.com/books/sails-js-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/sails-js-in-action), a Manning book about Sails written by Irl Nathan (creator of Sailscasts) and myself. It is set to be published this Spring. Finally re: the next generation of Sailscasts-- I don't want to speak for Irl there, but I should point out that there are 6 episodes of the second series of tutorials available (https://github.com/irlnathan/activityoverlord20 https://github.com/irlnathan/activityoverlord20). You can also see the final example app that Irl and I worked on together which includes a reference implementation of present/idle/away/offline status, user login, and chat here: https://github.com/balderdashy/activity-overlord-2-preview https://github.com/balderdashy/activity-overlord-2-preview

kevinob11 11y ago

Fair enough, though I do have some experience with shipping to production. I do have quite a few other issues with sails and waterline (ORM). Waterline provided lifecycle hooks, but limited their power and had poor documentation on extending them. Same for sails core itself, it had hooks for writing modules and extensions, but no one outside of the core team knew well how to use them. As for migrations I ended up doing all of my own migrations with knex, I'd love to see knex or sequelize be the core of a new ORM, rather than a quickly cobbled together sql module. Trails has promised something better on a lot of these fronts through modularity, I hope they deliver.

clay_to_n 11y ago
Lack of documentation has probably been my biggest gripe with Sails. The documentation on their website was broken for almost a year ("but it's on github! Go find it there"). They had a Getting Started "Sailscasts" series that was helpful, and then they released the beginning of the V2 videos (using a SPA w/ Angular), but only got three videos in.
- sgress454 11y ago
  What's broken on the website? All the docs on http://sailsjs.org/ http://sailsjs.org/ work for me.
  - clay_to_n 11y ago
    It works now. It didn't for most of 2015. The index page would send you to broken pages (but if you went to GitHub you could find the info).
    - mikermcneil 11y ago
      Thanks for following up, Clay. Sorry sailsjs.org caused trouble for you last year. You're right-- fixing SEO permalinks in our docs (i.e. converting sailsjs.org from an SPA to a site w/ server-rendered views) was a pretty slow and involved process. This was due in part to the fact that we switched to deeply-nested navigation in the docs, but also because of the sheer number of old links we had to maintain from two different past versions of the website. We weren't able to preserve them all, but we did our best to maintain the functionality of as many legacy hashbang (`#!`) and Angular-style (`/#/`) links as we could. I'm glad to hear the doc links are working for you now. We also owe Kevin Burke from Shyp a big thank you for drawing our attention to the SEO problem in the first place. Regardless of where Shyp goes with their tech stack long term, it has been immensely helpful to learn from Kevin's experiences using the framework there. Those lessons have already impacted the direction of Sails, and will continue to influence its future development. On the subject of documentation, I wanted to share two other resources from 2015, in case either of them might be helpful for you: The first is a free Sails course on Platzi (https://courses.platzi.com/courses/develop-apps-sails-js/ https://courses.platzi.com/courses/develop-apps-sails-js/). It covers best practices for authentication, blueprints vs. custom actions, and multi-instance deployment to Heroku, and contains some great Q&A. The second is "Sails.js in Action" (https://www.manning.com/books/sails-js-in-action https://www.manning.com/books/sails-js-in-action), a Manning book about Sails written by Irl Nathan (creator of Sailscasts) and myself. It is set to be published this Spring. Finally re: the next generation of Sailscasts-- I don't want to speak for Irl there, but I should point out that there are 6 episodes of the second series of tutorials available (https://github.com/irlnathan/activityoverlord20 https://github.com/irlnathan/activityoverlord20). You can also see the final example app that Irl and I worked on together which includes a reference implementation of present/idle/away/offline status, user login, and chat here: https://github.com/balderdashy/activity-overlord-2-preview https://github.com/balderdashy/activity-overlord-2-preview