6 ms·

Rails developers should learn React

56 points by revorad 10y ago

midgetjones 10y ago
> Learning to use React will make you more money and a better developer. Nice zeugma!
- ooqr 10y ago
  Thank you for teaching me what this is called. I always found it awkward.
  - midgetjones 10y ago
    No problem! And now, I shall take my coat and my leave.
cyberferret 10y ago
I think I must have some sort of strange default wiring in my brain. I've developed code for over 30 years using many different languages, but when I tried to get into Rails about 10 years ago, I just couldn't get my head around it. Nothing seemed to click and go into place for me. I ended up using Ruby, but via a Sinatra based framework called Padrino. It just seemed to make more sense to me. The same thing more recently with React. I tried dabbling with it about a year ago, but it just felt like an ill fitting jacket. Couldn't get the hang of it. Now I've been playing a bit with Vue.js and seem so find that fit better for my old brain. Oh, did I mention that I just turned 50. Perhaps it is a young person vs older person thing, or perhaps my synapses are just too wired in a certain way from decades of habit? I'd be interested to hear feedback from more ahem mature developers out there to see if they experience anything similar.
- smcl 10y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm "young" in this instance, but I'm 31 and have been coding since I was ~15 and I had the same feeling. "An ill fitting jacket" is a nice way to describe it - I can't put my finger on exactly what feels wrong but a lot of things that "magically" happen bother me.
  - olavgg 10y ago
    Actually for me, React fitted me well as a jacket! Until a friend asked me why there was and advantage to spend an extra minute taking on and off that jacket instead of using a simpler jacket(vanillajs) that fitted just as well but that I could take on and off in seconds. My conclusion today is that the massive hype around React, Angular and so on, is a similar story as The Emperor's new clothes.
    - softawre 10y ago
      > vanillajs Even if you don't need a view framework, do you do serious work with no libraries? What browsers do you support? It'd get really frustrating to support even IE10 with nothing protecting you from random idiosyncrasy
      - nacs 10y ago
        > support even IE10 with nothing protecting you At work we still support IE8 for some clients. VanillaJS? No thanks. I'll take even jQuery 1.X (2.x drops IE8 support) over vanilla.
      - olavgg 10y ago
        Yep, it is really not that hard, what do you find challenging?
  - sdegutis 10y ago
    Also 31, also coding since ~15, and also had trouble wrapping my head around Rails. For me I think it was mainly because with Rails, the implicit conventions are actually hidden rules, and they're not always intuitive either, which made memorizing them much harder than, say, memorizing a small set of simple functions in an actual library. That's probably also why I have so much trouble with CSS I'm guessing. These days I maintain a Clojure web app that uses Compojure, and I have to say it's significantly easier to reason about than the iceberg Rails is.
- eternalban 10y ago
  Sounds like your sweet spot is more towards the library end of library/'light weight framework' vs the 'full blown framework' spectrum. I don't believe it has anything to do with age.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    I agree. I should have about the same age of cyberferret and I won't do anything serious with sinatra or padrino. Too much work to do. I don't have the time for that and my customers don't have the money. I wrote web apps from scratch in C (not ++) and Perl in the 90s but I don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, and after 10 years and many developers Rails is a much better wheel than anything I can build myself. Replace Rails with any other comparable framework, even if any other framework I've seen requires to do more work.
  - true_religion 10y ago
    Except Vue is a framework but React isn't.
    - nogridbag 10y ago
      It depends what you mean by "Vue". Vue itself is just the "View" part - the same as React. While you can optionally use the official router and state management libraries, these are completely independent and unnecessary.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  I don't think it is easy to dabble in React starting at zero knowledge of all these frameworks. Vue is just accessible and familiar enough to be more approachable at first. When buiding an internal app I took a long hard look at React, but ended up with Vue. I had previously used Angular 1.x. I know I see this said a lot but the comprehensibility of these frameworks and tooling is borderline impossible to deal with for dabblers. Docs break almost instantly (Angular 2.x). It is hard to manage the number of small ever changing tools, even when you understand the principles. I think if you took someone with good knowledge of C and good knowledge of Javascript (NOT web), just the base languages it would be easier getting into systems programming!
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    I should clarify, that my definition of 'dabbling' is usually to build an actual app with it. I will usually try and build an app that I have already done in another language, just to get familiar with the new language oddities etc. Funny that you mentioned AngularJS - I built quite a few apps using the Ionic Framework a couple of years back, and that is (was) built upon Angular 1. I found Angular quite easy to pick up and run with. React, not so much. But its all OK. I am sure React is a great framework and all, just not my taste...
    - bitexploder 10y ago
      I am with you. I often want to enjoy the magic of something like React, but when your entire coding task is a man day or two it becomes really hard to justify learning React. That is my main gripe, many would just say that means "React is not for you" and technically that is obviously true. But in reality it is just the immature tooling around everything getting in the way. It is all in such a state of flux and experimentation that you can't always do things that should be simple simply. I think developers often do their own work disservice by not being a little more careful with dependencies, basically. Someone spends a few days wrangling a pile of NPM packages, build frameworks, and minifiers into this magical state that lets them operate very productively, but it isn't scaleable productivity in that now you have forced the whole developer community to do this multi day learning battle. And now as your whole pile of JS evolves under you, you are committed to this stack and keeping up with the evolution of all the dependencies. You end up with a lot of "least bad" solutions that aren't actually very good to the core problem. I see that as React's biggest problem with adoption. The core model is actually really great, but the usability is a steep learning curve.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  Rails is, by design, a very opinionated tool. The focus on establishing sensible defaults as a convention is great if you can work at least somewhat within those conventions, but it can become increasingly annoying if you regularly bypass the defaults. The goal is to make development easier, but you probably won't gain those benefits if your definition of "sensible defaults" isn't compatible with the choices made by Rails. Sinatra is a very different approach, which may work better if you want minimal library that doesn't involve a set of design conventions. Both Rails and Sinatra are useful tools; use whichever is a better fit for your needs.
- chrismealy 10y ago
  I felt the same way at first, but I read through the rails guides and it all made sense. And for people who work on a bunch of different CRUD apps all that conformity is a big win. You can jump back into a project and already know where everything is and how it fits together.
mattmanser 10y ago
Honest question, is it really here to stay? What's different between React today and Backbone 4 years ago or Angular 2 years ago? Does it solve all the problems of the predecessors? People are already starting to talk about Vue like it's the new messiah.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  It is sort of like Go vs Rust in terms of learning cost. Clearly, based on React's popularity the cost is worth it to many. Vue has really nice docs and is more approachable. Not a messiah but for many projects it is a great choice.
- kls 10y ago
  I believe it is, the problem with both Backbone and Angular is that they treat UI development like it is still assembling a page and then sending it down to the client. They encourage monolithic controllers that are not discreetly tied to the UI. This was a natural outgrowth of web developers being comfortable with that model in transitioning over from the server side. The problem is, it sucked on the server side and it sucks on the client side. In my opinion Vue does not solve the problem that react does as it does not black box the component and define you inputs and outputs. You can still write monolithic code-bases with it. It has a stronger component model than Angular did with directives but that component model can be circumvented. Worse yet two way binding is the crack of web dev. It gets you hooked on it's "easy" but as your code-base explodes you loose all trace-ability of when and how stuff changes and in my opinion, that is where the nastiest bugs surface. If you actually get into the internals of react, you soon realize it looks a lot like windows UI programming in the old days. It is a return to principals that work when composing UI's from components. It's not a new concept, there have been many frameworks that tried it over the years (Dojo comes to mind) but react was the first one to hit critical mass and the first one to come along while most of the other tool-chain was available or fairly easy to build. The tool-chain makes it complex to get started but once you have a project going, it is far easier to maintain, and maintenance is where you really pay for your total cost of ownership. Now all this comes with the caveats of project size, I personally work on large scale replacement of traditional application with web based applications and I think react (and it's tool-chain) is an excellent technology to manage a large code base that business apps require. However if all you are building is an informational website with a newsletter sign up form, it's just not the right technology.
ungzd 10y ago
Wordpress and jQuery have way more job postings. But still React does not require extensive training, it has quite simple API and no quirky concepts, and you can start using it right away without "learning".
- bitexploder 10y ago
  I am not so sure I agree. React is anything but easy when getting started. It takes work and an agreement to learn a certain amount of "modern" JS+Web tooling. If you come in with strong engineering and dev background, but not a lot of knowledge about modern web libs and frameworks it can be more than a small chore. I do agree, once you are into it, its design philosophy has a lot of appeal.
wc_cs 10y ago
I'd like to know where he's getting his figures about Rails from. As someone who left a Rails job (no React) fairly recently and has now switched to a React-centric role, while I was job-hunting there didn't seem to be a great demand for developers who knew React and Rails. It's almost like they're suggesting that people from a Django background will be worse off, which I disagree with. Regardless, I do agree that Full-Stack Rails developers should learn React.
- revorad 10y ago
  I linked to one HN whoishiring thread in the article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846216 - but if you look at some others, you will notice that a lot of companies are using both Rails and React. I've seen the same on other job boards. My own last consulting gig was at a company which was gradually porting its Rails view layer to React.
- brogrammernot 10y ago
  I've only seen this where companies had some of their apps/infrastructure running off Rails(mostly API based stuff, minimal services etc) and were wanting to use React on the front end. I haven't seen a lot of postings either for the specific pairing. I honestly haven't seen a ton of Rails job posts over the last two years. Mostly Node or C# posts or the occasional PHP as far as backend code goes. I like Rails too, first true MVC I used.
yannski 10y ago
Rails developers, ie web developers having appetite for nice, industrialization ready technologies, may prefer Ember...
pmontra 10y ago
I think this could be right but does one person can really handle both the backend and the frontend projects when the frontend becomes a first class project from day 1 instead of a kind of afterthought? In other words: a single developer can start a Rails+jQuery sugar web site in N days. Where he would be with Rails(API)+React after those N days? Another question. I checked those rails+react gems. The pro is that they put everything inside the Rails project. The cons is exactly the same. Even in the case the same person is doing both jobs, shouldn't we acknowledge that they are two separate projects and work on them separately?
- revorad 10y ago
  Re: the gems, you're right. There are multiple approaches. Putting everything in Rails is the easiest to get started, but you can gradually separate React from Rails if your app needs it. I wrote about it here - https://learnetto.com/blog/3-ways-to-use-react-with-ruby-on-rails-5 https://learnetto.com/blog/3-ways-to-use-react-with-ruby-on-...
MattyMc 10y ago
TL;DR It will make you more money. There are many ways to integrate React with Rails. To get started do the React tutorial and buy my book.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
miloshadzic 10y ago
<X> developers should learn <Y> X - What you know Y - Technology du jour
- joekrill 10y ago
  It absolutely baffles me that people still like to call React a "Technology du jour". It's ubiquitous today. It's _THE_ go-to front-end web development UI framework.
  - eterm 10y ago
    In your bubble that might be true. In my bubble everyone is still using mostly ad-hoc jquery consisting half of snippets copy-pasted from stackoverflow.
    - jrfarina 10y ago
      What bubble is that may I ask?
      - sullenpaladin 10y ago
        I share a bubble with eterm, in a Fortune 100 enterprise. I have heard React mentioned once by a particularly engaged front-end developer, but everything I know of in production is JQuery, a couple Angular 1 apps, and a whole lot of horrible older stuff.
    - basch 10y ago
      http://stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/ http://stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/
  - miloshadzic 10y ago
    I actually like React, but be aware people were saying the same shit about Angular until relatively recently. The hype cycle is real.
pawelkomarnicki 10y ago
I noped out of React the moment they made that clear they expect me to pass HTML as the JavaScript method attribute without quotes ;-)
mhd 10y ago
If there's one current technology that I wouldn't call omakase, it would be React. I thought it would get better once redux reached a certain mindshare, but now there's a plethora of redux helpers, "best" practices etc. (Each of which seems to focus on a new and/or experimental JavaScript language feature) Hey, I program Perl in my day job, but this is way too much Tim Toady even for me. (And if "more money" were the only reason for technology adoption, there's probably more to be made in Enterprise Java development, at least on average)
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  Will you explain what you mean a bit more, please? I don't understand your analogies.
  - byroot 10y ago
    Omakase is in reference to http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...
    - mhd 10y ago
      And Tim Today is how "TMTOWTDI", i.e. "There's More Than One Way To Do It" is pronounced in certain circles.
cygned 10y ago
A lot of people say, learning React makes you a better developer. I think, what they actually mean, is functional programming.
- e12e 10y ago
  Having glanced at react, angular(2), riot.js and vue - and being somewhat familiar with procedural, message passing, class/inheritance OO, functional and logic/declarative (SQL/Prolog) paradigms - I can't help but think that many of the developers that praise react do so because react introduced them to (a rather convoluted form of) functional programming, leveraging templates (the php paradigm) as a form of gateway (in the teaching/approachability sense) approach? Because so far I just can't see react as the best/simplest approach to dragging REST[1] apps into the world of GUI COD(Code on Demand)[1] apps. Vue seems to strike a much more elegant balance, for example. Especially in terms of life-cycle - I can't say I'd look forward to maintaining most complicated js stacks for say five years - with a horde of (rapidly evolving) dependecies, and often a plethora of build tools/steps that in general all do some rather simple, but incompatible source-to-source translation (templates to html, some js dialect to another, scss to css). Vue certainly doesn't fix all of that - but it seems a bit more consistent and simple IMNHO. But maybe it's just me. It'd be interesting to hear if anyone's actually made the jump from "react in anger" to "vue in anger" - or vice-versa? [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
  - cygned 10y ago
    React is simple while it's extremely complex at the same time; the library's concept is actually not that complicated and the API is relatively small. A lot of developers struggle when it comes to architecting, though. I know many "enterprise developers" that favor Angular (and Angular 2) because of the "out-of-the-box" character and the magic that happens under the hood. Even with years of front-end experience I see these engineers fail at creating a reliable, documented and structured architecture. I guess, that's because they don't have time, budget or are no longer used to fiddle around and explore third-party projects (which is actually sad). That is, getting started with Angular (or Vue, I expect) is easier and you will get something together faster. I expect the reason why React is so popular to be the mix you describe - although "templating" is a bit off, because JSX isn't templating in the PHP or JSF way. From my personal point of view I can say, that I never regret the decision to switch to React (from Angular/Backbone.js). Especially the simple structuring (basically a component tree) is incredible simple compared to what you had in Angular 1. I am leading two projects with six digit LOC in the front-end and it is a pleasure to see how quickly new member can contribute, how clear the architecture is. Because there's no magic at all. But that's all very personal, opinions differ greatly and I even know one developer who loves Angular 2. But he also has to work with Hibernate in the backend and compared to that everything is great - just kidding ;) --- Edit: I have read Fielding's paper for my B. Sc. thesis a couple of times and it's a great piece work. Should be a mandatory lecture for a lot of fields.
Marinlemaignan 10y ago
React developers should learn Rails too.. it'd make everyone's life easier.
nnd 10y ago
Serious question: what's the advantage of using Rails for the backend/APIs over Node or various Python frameworks? I want to pick up a new backend stack and deciding between Rails and Go.
- basch 10y ago
  can you go pure backend? https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-phoenix https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-pho...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throw2016 10y ago
I think the technology discussed and preferred at HN is often skewed towards heavily promoted SV based tech, large unicorn backed tech or a technology stack that currently pays well. And often is not reflective of the actual quality of the technology. I don't think this is how how it should be in a tech focussed community. Things should be judged on merit not value added to resume or potenial for well paying jobs.

56 points by revorad 10y ago

midgetjones 10y ago

> Learning to use React will make you more money and a better developer. Nice zeugma!

ooqr 10y ago
Thank you for teaching me what this is called. I always found it awkward.
- midgetjones 10y ago
  No problem! And now, I shall take my coat and my leave.

cyberferret 10y ago

I think I must have some sort of strange default wiring in my brain. I've developed code for over 30 years using many different languages, but when I tried to get into Rails about 10 years ago, I just couldn't get my head around it. Nothing seemed to click and go into place for me. I ended up using Ruby, but via a Sinatra based framework called Padrino. It just seemed to make more sense to me. The same thing more recently with React. I tried dabbling with it about a year ago, but it just felt like an ill fitting jacket. Couldn't get the hang of it. Now I've been playing a bit with Vue.js and seem so find that fit better for my old brain. Oh, did I mention that I just turned 50. Perhaps it is a young person vs older person thing, or perhaps my synapses are just too wired in a certain way from decades of habit? I'd be interested to hear feedback from more ahem mature developers out there to see if they experience anything similar.

smcl 10y ago
I'm not sure if I'm "young" in this instance, but I'm 31 and have been coding since I was ~15 and I had the same feeling. "An ill fitting jacket" is a nice way to describe it - I can't put my finger on exactly what feels wrong but a lot of things that "magically" happen bother me.
- olavgg 10y ago
  Actually for me, React fitted me well as a jacket! Until a friend asked me why there was and advantage to spend an extra minute taking on and off that jacket instead of using a simpler jacket(vanillajs) that fitted just as well but that I could take on and off in seconds. My conclusion today is that the massive hype around React, Angular and so on, is a similar story as The Emperor's new clothes.
  - softawre 10y ago
    > vanillajs Even if you don't need a view framework, do you do serious work with no libraries? What browsers do you support? It'd get really frustrating to support even IE10 with nothing protecting you from random idiosyncrasy
    - nacs 10y ago
      > support even IE10 with nothing protecting you At work we still support IE8 for some clients. VanillaJS? No thanks. I'll take even jQuery 1.X (2.x drops IE8 support) over vanilla.
    - olavgg 10y ago
      Yep, it is really not that hard, what do you find challenging?
- sdegutis 10y ago
  Also 31, also coding since ~15, and also had trouble wrapping my head around Rails. For me I think it was mainly because with Rails, the implicit conventions are actually hidden rules, and they're not always intuitive either, which made memorizing them much harder than, say, memorizing a small set of simple functions in an actual library. That's probably also why I have so much trouble with CSS I'm guessing. These days I maintain a Clojure web app that uses Compojure, and I have to say it's significantly easier to reason about than the iceberg Rails is.
eternalban 10y ago
Sounds like your sweet spot is more towards the library end of library/'light weight framework' vs the 'full blown framework' spectrum. I don't believe it has anything to do with age.
- pmontra 10y ago
  I agree. I should have about the same age of cyberferret and I won't do anything serious with sinatra or padrino. Too much work to do. I don't have the time for that and my customers don't have the money. I wrote web apps from scratch in C (not ++) and Perl in the 90s but I don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, and after 10 years and many developers Rails is a much better wheel than anything I can build myself. Replace Rails with any other comparable framework, even if any other framework I've seen requires to do more work.
- true_religion 10y ago
  Except Vue is a framework but React isn't.
  - nogridbag 10y ago
    It depends what you mean by "Vue". Vue itself is just the "View" part - the same as React. While you can optionally use the official router and state management libraries, these are completely independent and unnecessary.
bitexploder 10y ago
I don't think it is easy to dabble in React starting at zero knowledge of all these frameworks. Vue is just accessible and familiar enough to be more approachable at first. When buiding an internal app I took a long hard look at React, but ended up with Vue. I had previously used Angular 1.x. I know I see this said a lot but the comprehensibility of these frameworks and tooling is borderline impossible to deal with for dabblers. Docs break almost instantly (Angular 2.x). It is hard to manage the number of small ever changing tools, even when you understand the principles. I think if you took someone with good knowledge of C and good knowledge of Javascript (NOT web), just the base languages it would be easier getting into systems programming!
- cyberferret 10y ago
  I should clarify, that my definition of 'dabbling' is usually to build an actual app with it. I will usually try and build an app that I have already done in another language, just to get familiar with the new language oddities etc. Funny that you mentioned AngularJS - I built quite a few apps using the Ionic Framework a couple of years back, and that is (was) built upon Angular 1. I found Angular quite easy to pick up and run with. React, not so much. But its all OK. I am sure React is a great framework and all, just not my taste...
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    I am with you. I often want to enjoy the magic of something like React, but when your entire coding task is a man day or two it becomes really hard to justify learning React. That is my main gripe, many would just say that means "React is not for you" and technically that is obviously true. But in reality it is just the immature tooling around everything getting in the way. It is all in such a state of flux and experimentation that you can't always do things that should be simple simply. I think developers often do their own work disservice by not being a little more careful with dependencies, basically. Someone spends a few days wrangling a pile of NPM packages, build frameworks, and minifiers into this magical state that lets them operate very productively, but it isn't scaleable productivity in that now you have forced the whole developer community to do this multi day learning battle. And now as your whole pile of JS evolves under you, you are committed to this stack and keeping up with the evolution of all the dependencies. You end up with a lot of "least bad" solutions that aren't actually very good to the core problem. I see that as React's biggest problem with adoption. The core model is actually really great, but the usability is a steep learning curve.
pdkl95 10y ago
Rails is, by design, a very opinionated tool. The focus on establishing sensible defaults as a convention is great if you can work at least somewhat within those conventions, but it can become increasingly annoying if you regularly bypass the defaults. The goal is to make development easier, but you probably won't gain those benefits if your definition of "sensible defaults" isn't compatible with the choices made by Rails. Sinatra is a very different approach, which may work better if you want minimal library that doesn't involve a set of design conventions. Both Rails and Sinatra are useful tools; use whichever is a better fit for your needs.
chrismealy 10y ago
I felt the same way at first, but I read through the rails guides and it all made sense. And for people who work on a bunch of different CRUD apps all that conformity is a big win. You can jump back into a project and already know where everything is and how it fits together.

mattmanser 10y ago

Honest question, is it really here to stay? What's different between React today and Backbone 4 years ago or Angular 2 years ago? Does it solve all the problems of the predecessors? People are already starting to talk about Vue like it's the new messiah.

bitexploder 10y ago
It is sort of like Go vs Rust in terms of learning cost. Clearly, based on React's popularity the cost is worth it to many. Vue has really nice docs and is more approachable. Not a messiah but for many projects it is a great choice.
kls 10y ago
I believe it is, the problem with both Backbone and Angular is that they treat UI development like it is still assembling a page and then sending it down to the client. They encourage monolithic controllers that are not discreetly tied to the UI. This was a natural outgrowth of web developers being comfortable with that model in transitioning over from the server side. The problem is, it sucked on the server side and it sucks on the client side. In my opinion Vue does not solve the problem that react does as it does not black box the component and define you inputs and outputs. You can still write monolithic code-bases with it. It has a stronger component model than Angular did with directives but that component model can be circumvented. Worse yet two way binding is the crack of web dev. It gets you hooked on it's "easy" but as your code-base explodes you loose all trace-ability of when and how stuff changes and in my opinion, that is where the nastiest bugs surface. If you actually get into the internals of react, you soon realize it looks a lot like windows UI programming in the old days. It is a return to principals that work when composing UI's from components. It's not a new concept, there have been many frameworks that tried it over the years (Dojo comes to mind) but react was the first one to hit critical mass and the first one to come along while most of the other tool-chain was available or fairly easy to build. The tool-chain makes it complex to get started but once you have a project going, it is far easier to maintain, and maintenance is where you really pay for your total cost of ownership. Now all this comes with the caveats of project size, I personally work on large scale replacement of traditional application with web based applications and I think react (and it's tool-chain) is an excellent technology to manage a large code base that business apps require. However if all you are building is an informational website with a newsletter sign up form, it's just not the right technology.

ungzd 10y ago

Wordpress and jQuery have way more job postings. But still React does not require extensive training, it has quite simple API and no quirky concepts, and you can start using it right away without "learning".

bitexploder 10y ago
I am not so sure I agree. React is anything but easy when getting started. It takes work and an agreement to learn a certain amount of "modern" JS+Web tooling. If you come in with strong engineering and dev background, but not a lot of knowledge about modern web libs and frameworks it can be more than a small chore. I do agree, once you are into it, its design philosophy has a lot of appeal.

wc_cs 10y ago

I'd like to know where he's getting his figures about Rails from. As someone who left a Rails job (no React) fairly recently and has now switched to a React-centric role, while I was job-hunting there didn't seem to be a great demand for developers who knew React and Rails. It's almost like they're suggesting that people from a Django background will be worse off, which I disagree with. Regardless, I do agree that Full-Stack Rails developers should learn React.

revorad 10y ago
I linked to one HN whoishiring thread in the article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12846216 - but if you look at some others, you will notice that a lot of companies are using both Rails and React. I've seen the same on other job boards. My own last consulting gig was at a company which was gradually porting its Rails view layer to React.
brogrammernot 10y ago
I've only seen this where companies had some of their apps/infrastructure running off Rails(mostly API based stuff, minimal services etc) and were wanting to use React on the front end. I haven't seen a lot of postings either for the specific pairing. I honestly haven't seen a ton of Rails job posts over the last two years. Mostly Node or C# posts or the occasional PHP as far as backend code goes. I like Rails too, first true MVC I used.

yannski 10y ago

Rails developers, ie web developers having appetite for nice, industrialization ready technologies, may prefer Ember...

pmontra 10y ago

I think this could be right but does one person can really handle both the backend and the frontend projects when the frontend becomes a first class project from day 1 instead of a kind of afterthought? In other words: a single developer can start a Rails+jQuery sugar web site in N days. Where he would be with Rails(API)+React after those N days? Another question. I checked those rails+react gems. The pro is that they put everything inside the Rails project. The cons is exactly the same. Even in the case the same person is doing both jobs, shouldn't we acknowledge that they are two separate projects and work on them separately?

revorad 10y ago
Re: the gems, you're right. There are multiple approaches. Putting everything in Rails is the easiest to get started, but you can gradually separate React from Rails if your app needs it. I wrote about it here - https://learnetto.com/blog/3-ways-to-use-react-with-ruby-on-rails-5 https://learnetto.com/blog/3-ways-to-use-react-with-ruby-on-...

MattyMc 10y ago

TL;DR It will make you more money. There are many ways to integrate React with Rails. To get started do the React tutorial and buy my book.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

miloshadzic 10y ago

<X> developers should learn <Y> X - What you know Y - Technology du jour

joekrill 10y ago
It absolutely baffles me that people still like to call React a "Technology du jour". It's ubiquitous today. It's _THE_ go-to front-end web development UI framework.
- eterm 10y ago
  In your bubble that might be true. In my bubble everyone is still using mostly ad-hoc jquery consisting half of snippets copy-pasted from stackoverflow.
  - jrfarina 10y ago
    What bubble is that may I ask?
    - sullenpaladin 10y ago
      I share a bubble with eterm, in a Fortune 100 enterprise. I have heard React mentioned once by a particularly engaged front-end developer, but everything I know of in production is JQuery, a couple Angular 1 apps, and a whole lot of horrible older stuff.
  - basch 10y ago
    http://stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/ http://stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/
- miloshadzic 10y ago
  I actually like React, but be aware people were saying the same shit about Angular until relatively recently. The hype cycle is real.

pawelkomarnicki 10y ago

I noped out of React the moment they made that clear they expect me to pass HTML as the JavaScript method attribute without quotes ;-)

mhd 10y ago

If there's one current technology that I wouldn't call omakase, it would be React. I thought it would get better once redux reached a certain mindshare, but now there's a plethora of redux helpers, "best" practices etc. (Each of which seems to focus on a new and/or experimental JavaScript language feature) Hey, I program Perl in my day job, but this is way too much Tim Toady even for me. (And if "more money" were the only reason for technology adoption, there's probably more to be made in Enterprise Java development, at least on average)

monkmartinez 10y ago
Will you explain what you mean a bit more, please? I don't understand your analogies.
- byroot 10y ago
  Omakase is in reference to http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.htm...
  - mhd 10y ago
    And Tim Today is how "TMTOWTDI", i.e. "There's More Than One Way To Do It" is pronounced in certain circles.

cygned 10y ago

A lot of people say, learning React makes you a better developer. I think, what they actually mean, is functional programming.

e12e 10y ago
Having glanced at react, angular(2), riot.js and vue - and being somewhat familiar with procedural, message passing, class/inheritance OO, functional and logic/declarative (SQL/Prolog) paradigms - I can't help but think that many of the developers that praise react do so because react introduced them to (a rather convoluted form of) functional programming, leveraging templates (the php paradigm) as a form of gateway (in the teaching/approachability sense) approach? Because so far I just can't see react as the best/simplest approach to dragging REST[1] apps into the world of GUI COD(Code on Demand)[1] apps. Vue seems to strike a much more elegant balance, for example. Especially in terms of life-cycle - I can't say I'd look forward to maintaining most complicated js stacks for say five years - with a horde of (rapidly evolving) dependecies, and often a plethora of build tools/steps that in general all do some rather simple, but incompatible source-to-source translation (templates to html, some js dialect to another, scss to css). Vue certainly doesn't fix all of that - but it seems a bit more consistent and simple IMNHO. But maybe it's just me. It'd be interesting to hear if anyone's actually made the jump from "react in anger" to "vue in anger" - or vice-versa? [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm
- cygned 10y ago
  React is simple while it's extremely complex at the same time; the library's concept is actually not that complicated and the API is relatively small. A lot of developers struggle when it comes to architecting, though. I know many "enterprise developers" that favor Angular (and Angular 2) because of the "out-of-the-box" character and the magic that happens under the hood. Even with years of front-end experience I see these engineers fail at creating a reliable, documented and structured architecture. I guess, that's because they don't have time, budget or are no longer used to fiddle around and explore third-party projects (which is actually sad). That is, getting started with Angular (or Vue, I expect) is easier and you will get something together faster. I expect the reason why React is so popular to be the mix you describe - although "templating" is a bit off, because JSX isn't templating in the PHP or JSF way. From my personal point of view I can say, that I never regret the decision to switch to React (from Angular/Backbone.js). Especially the simple structuring (basically a component tree) is incredible simple compared to what you had in Angular 1. I am leading two projects with six digit LOC in the front-end and it is a pleasure to see how quickly new member can contribute, how clear the architecture is. Because there's no magic at all. But that's all very personal, opinions differ greatly and I even know one developer who loves Angular 2. But he also has to work with Hibernate in the backend and compared to that everything is great - just kidding ;) --- Edit: I have read Fielding's paper for my B. Sc. thesis a couple of times and it's a great piece work. Should be a mandatory lecture for a lot of fields.

Marinlemaignan 10y ago

React developers should learn Rails too.. it'd make everyone's life easier.

nnd 10y ago

Serious question: what's the advantage of using Rails for the backend/APIs over Node or various Python frameworks? I want to pick up a new backend stack and deciding between Rails and Go.

basch 10y ago
can you go pure backend? https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-phoenix https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-we-replaced-react-with-pho...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throw2016 10y ago

I think the technology discussed and preferred at HN is often skewed towards heavily promoted SV based tech, large unicorn backed tech or a technology stack that currently pays well. And often is not reflective of the actual quality of the technology. I don't think this is how how it should be in a tech focussed community. Things should be judged on merit not value added to resume or potenial for well paying jobs.