4 ms·

Rails isn't the fastest or the smartest framework. It has weird choices, confusing aspects and some downright terrible defaults, but for me at least, it is the

Rails isn't the fastest or the smartest framework. It has weird choices, confusing aspects and some downright terrible defaults, but for me at least, it is the best framework and it has been for years for one simple reason: DOCUMENTATION! Every few years or so, a bunch of these articles come out shouting from the roof tops, "Rails is dead!" and "Long live Rails!" They often like to praise some new framework, like Hanami, as the answer to all our woes, but they never seem to address documentation. In my opinion, documentation is where Rails blows every other framework away. I have never been forced to read Rails' source code to understand how something works (I have read some of the source, but for fun, not out of need), and I can't say that about any of the other framework I've worked with. There's always some obscure method or class somewhere in them that does something unintuitive that I always have to look up. In Rails, finding the documentation on that method is as simple as a Google search, but in django, expressjs, or any of the others I've encountered, that documentation usually doesn't even exist at all. Efficiency, scalability and reliability are all great, but when I'm starting a web app from scratch, they're really not that important. I can worry about those things once I have funding. In the meantime, I only need them to be good enough, and Rails defaults are usually good enough. What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded. Once I'm funded, then I can think about implementing JRuby or splitting code out into microservices or rewriting with another framework, but by then, I'll have the money to take my time. Until then, Rails is the perfect framework for me and I'll keep using it until it's not.

brightball 10y ago
Elixir and Phoenix is what you're looking for. Most of the goodness of Rails for productivity, without the long term bad decisions that come with it to force eventual rewrites when the funding comes. There's a reason Rails core guys have put so much time into it. It gets every...single...dang...decision...right. I may never use another language unless forced because it's what I've spent years trying to find.
- jonstokes 10y ago
  If you discover a hot new language/framework that solves all of your problems, then here is what you've actually learned: you didn't have any hard problems. No tool is perfect for every situation, and if you find one that is perfect for every situation that you encounter, then that says a lot more about you than about the tool.
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    He's right though, Elixir and Phoenix are amazing. It promises the productivity of Rails, while being blazingly fast and scalable. You'll never, ever need to rewrite your backend, even if you're handling traffic at the scale of Whatsapp. I would be hard-pressed to find a case where you'd want to write your web or mobile backend in anything else. So yeah, I'd claim that it's perfect for every web or mobile backend. Also, no framework is ever going to solve all of your "hard problems", and he didn't claim that at all. It's simply a much better base than Rails.
  - brightball 10y ago
    It's about balance and this has the right one for about 95% of what I do everyday in terms of client-server-database work, productivity, concurrency, stability, performance and scalability. That's where I spend most of my time on the web. Short of complex calculations or extreme niche scenarios...it does handle pretty much everything in terms of "around web" work. For niche scenarios use what's appropriate but for the space that Rails has occupied in the general purpose realm it's wonderful.
- base 10y ago
  Why does someone come to promote Elixir and Phoenix in every Ruby/Rails article? The first times was nice to see someone showing an alternative, now is almost like SPAM.
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    It's a religion. More seriously, the community just needs to be a lot bigger before it's on par with the Ruby ecosystem. For example, there's currently no Elixir library that will inline CSS in emails before sending.
smrtinsert 10y ago
I haven't seen any about Rails being dead, just people ready to move on from Rails and how it's not for them any longer. If it makes sense for a particular shop, they should continue using it. I say this as a non Rails user but believer in the right tool for the right job.
ssmoot 10y ago
Just looked at the rails documentation for the first time in years. It's drastically improved. My experience with earlier versions was that you kinda had to piece it together yourself. Learning Play Framework was 10X easier for me since the docs were already there: https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Home https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Home So I think maybe you're just not considering non-Ruby options. Which is totally your prerogative. Just saying it's not my experience. It may be the best Ruby framework. But that's a different argument. > What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded. Aside from syntax, I don't see any reason anyone would be faster with Rails. It's certainly not my experience. I worked with Ruby for 8 years. I've seen some very talented and very enthusiastic Rails developers. I've never seen one that could build an app faster than even an ASP.NET developer from years ago, and I certainly don't see any advantage over Play, which is generally more stable, much faster, projects generally have fewer dependencies. The performance advantage of other platforms is underappreciated IMO. The fastest code is no code. If I can do something in Scala through brute that would be impractical to do within the request/response cycle in a Rails Action, that's a development speed advantage. If I never need to consider using some sort of background job service like Resque or message queue because I can just say `Future(someComplexOperation)`, that's a development speed advantage. If I don't need to tune my app or worry about my caching strategies because it's just that fast... You get the point I'm trying to make I'm sure. Outside of performance, deployment (far simpler with Play), language syntax, and ActiveRecord (I'd just use the simpler, faster Lightbend Slick library) they're basically the same framework. Play doesn't chart much new territory. Sure WebSockets integration with Actors is lightyears ahead. But many won't ever touch it. There's some JSON stuff with validations that's very powerful, but embedding the equivalent of a JSON schema in your Action is verbose beyond trivial examples. I'm not sure how much use it gets. I found Play much easier to learn than Rails (again, this was years ago) and much more consistent. Given the other advantages, all things being equal (familiar with both Scala and Ruby), it's tough to imagine many developers choosing Rails unless they were worried about externalities like building a team or something. It'd be interesting to hear the thought process of such developers though if they're out there.

brightball 10y ago

Elixir and Phoenix is what you're looking for. Most of the goodness of Rails for productivity, without the long term bad decisions that come with it to force eventual rewrites when the funding comes. There's a reason Rails core guys have put so much time into it. It gets every...single...dang...decision...right. I may never use another language unless forced because it's what I've spent years trying to find.

jonstokes 10y ago
If you discover a hot new language/framework that solves all of your problems, then here is what you've actually learned: you didn't have any hard problems. No tool is perfect for every situation, and if you find one that is perfect for every situation that you encounter, then that says a lot more about you than about the tool.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  He's right though, Elixir and Phoenix are amazing. It promises the productivity of Rails, while being blazingly fast and scalable. You'll never, ever need to rewrite your backend, even if you're handling traffic at the scale of Whatsapp. I would be hard-pressed to find a case where you'd want to write your web or mobile backend in anything else. So yeah, I'd claim that it's perfect for every web or mobile backend. Also, no framework is ever going to solve all of your "hard problems", and he didn't claim that at all. It's simply a much better base than Rails.
- brightball 10y ago
  It's about balance and this has the right one for about 95% of what I do everyday in terms of client-server-database work, productivity, concurrency, stability, performance and scalability. That's where I spend most of my time on the web. Short of complex calculations or extreme niche scenarios...it does handle pretty much everything in terms of "around web" work. For niche scenarios use what's appropriate but for the space that Rails has occupied in the general purpose realm it's wonderful.
base 10y ago
Why does someone come to promote Elixir and Phoenix in every Ruby/Rails article? The first times was nice to see someone showing an alternative, now is almost like SPAM.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  It's a religion. More seriously, the community just needs to be a lot bigger before it's on par with the Ruby ecosystem. For example, there's currently no Elixir library that will inline CSS in emails before sending.

smrtinsert 10y ago

I haven't seen any about Rails being dead, just people ready to move on from Rails and how it's not for them any longer. If it makes sense for a particular shop, they should continue using it. I say this as a non Rails user but believer in the right tool for the right job.

ssmoot 10y ago

Just looked at the rails documentation for the first time in years. It's drastically improved. My experience with earlier versions was that you kinda had to piece it together yourself. Learning Play Framework was 10X easier for me since the docs were already there: https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Home https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Home So I think maybe you're just not considering non-Ruby options. Which is totally your prerogative. Just saying it's not my experience. It may be the best Ruby framework. But that's a different argument. > What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded. Aside from syntax, I don't see any reason anyone would be faster with Rails. It's certainly not my experience. I worked with Ruby for 8 years. I've seen some very talented and very enthusiastic Rails developers. I've never seen one that could build an app faster than even an ASP.NET developer from years ago, and I certainly don't see any advantage over Play, which is generally more stable, much faster, projects generally have fewer dependencies. The performance advantage of other platforms is underappreciated IMO. The fastest code is no code. If I can do something in Scala through brute that would be impractical to do within the request/response cycle in a Rails Action, that's a development speed advantage. If I never need to consider using some sort of background job service like Resque or message queue because I can just say `Future(someComplexOperation)`, that's a development speed advantage. If I don't need to tune my app or worry about my caching strategies because it's just that fast... You get the point I'm trying to make I'm sure. Outside of performance, deployment (far simpler with Play), language syntax, and ActiveRecord (I'd just use the simpler, faster Lightbend Slick library) they're basically the same framework. Play doesn't chart much new territory. Sure WebSockets integration with Actors is lightyears ahead. But many won't ever touch it. There's some JSON stuff with validations that's very powerful, but embedding the equivalent of a JSON schema in your Action is verbose beyond trivial examples. I'm not sure how much use it gets. I found Play much easier to learn than Rails (again, this was years ago) and much more consistent. Given the other advantages, all things being equal (familiar with both Scala and Ruby), it's tough to imagine many developers choosing Rails unless they were worried about externalities like building a team or something. It'd be interesting to hear the thought process of such developers though if they're out there.