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This is mostly orthogonal, but I'm yet another dev who loves using Ruby, but absolutely hates Rails. Ruby is a joy to use, whereas Rails is soul sucking, anti f

This is mostly orthogonal, but I'm yet another dev who loves using Ruby, but absolutely hates Rails. Ruby is a joy to use, whereas Rails is soul sucking, anti fun and overrated. I haven't been paid to write a line of Ruby in over 4 years but I still use it for the occasional hobby project. Not only do I not use Rails for fun, I'd have to be close to starvation before I used it again for profit. Now I feel the urge to dust off my copy of 'Eloquent Ruby' and write some fun code.

owebmaster 9y ago
Back in 2008 Rails was the real fun. And their proposed way of doing web software was mainstream until angularjs exploded.
- bauerd 9y ago
  Angular is a frontend framework, Rails is a backend framework. Care to elaborate?
  - vectorpush 9y ago
    Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion. SPAs manage state and template rendering on the front-end, so much of the Rails machinery becomes unnecessary. You can still use Rails to implement your JSON API backend, but the simplicity of something like Sinatra is often preferable since you're increasing the complexity on the front. The node+react+webpack combo gave web devs the power to process application states and render the UI on the front-end and the back-end using the same code; a feat that is not possible at all with Rails pushing it a little further out of fashion. Of course, the SPA suffers plenty of criticism, and Rails is still a popular choice with and without an SPA on the front-end, but I think it's fair to say that Rails is no longer the "fun" way to do things (though the most fun doesn't mean the best business or engineering solution).
    - jholman 9y ago
      I agree with all of the major points of your comment, but I have a quibble: > Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion I dunno that Angular is the relevant point here. Rails (late 2005? I think?) post-dates the public existence of Gmail (public April 2004), a wildly popular SPA. It also post-dates the existence of Google Maps (early 2005). The famous blog post by Jesse James Garrett that coined the acronym "AJAX" is also from early 2005. The thing that Rails does well was already largely-obsolete before Rails was open-sourced. (Though that is one state-of-the-art buggy whip! Very impressive!)
      - vectorpush 9y ago
        I absolutely agree that the SPA was already a thing before angular, in fact, angular was specifically designed to wrangle the general design concerns related to building SPAs and doing so sold the distinct concept of the SPA to many developers.
  - hkjgkjy 9y ago
    The difference between front and backend web applications is nothing more but where the views are rendered - which on client side also means managing state and IO. This means Rails and Angular are doing the same job - the main difference is where data keeping and rendering is done.
    - bauerd 9y ago
      I disagree. For data persistence one still needs to talk to a backend. What sets Rails and Angular apart is not only view/template rendering.
      - wwweston 9y ago
        Both Angular and Rails talk to "a backend." In Angular's case it's (probably) an HTTP server handing over JSON representation of data. In Rails' case it might well be exactly the same thing, or it might well be a NoSQL database handing over JSON representations of data, or it might be an SQL database. You can certainly make distinctions between those data stores, but they have enough in common it's perfectly reasonable to say they're doing many of the same things. Now, Angular is considerably more horrible than Rails and tries to solve some additional front end problems badly, and its use is a likely indicator that the organization or individual that have decided to employ it aren't capable of making wise technical decisions, so I'd say it's also reasonable to make distinctions between the two on a number of levels. But there's considerable overlap in the kinds of problems they attempt to solve.
        dasil003 9y ago
        The difference is Rails can handle both the front-end and backend of a typical web application, whereas Angular is just the front-end. Equating Rails data store backend to Angular's service backend is a poor analogy. The concepts and principles behind web browser client code, server-side application code, and data stores are 3 completely different engineering paradigms.
        wwweston 9y ago
copperx 9y ago
Now I'm really curious. What framework would you prefer to use build a webapp? I'm looking for Rails alternatives.
- prh8 9y ago
  If you want something comparable (feature wise) to Rails, then check out Hanami. It's much better designed for large apps. If you are looking for a micro framework, I'd suggest Roda. I'd characterize those two as the modern replacements for Rails/Sinatra.
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Took a brief look at Hanami. Is it optimised for deployment to Heroku only? Or does it support AWS Elastic Beanstalk also?
    - prh8 9y ago
      It is just like any other Rack based app, can be deployed anywhere.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  For some reason, I could never get the hang of Rails. But when I found Sinatra, it all made perfect sense to me. Now I exclusively use Padrino [0] as the framework to build all my web apps. It is a framework on top of Sinatra that gives you a lot of the Rails goodness, but allows you to be really agnostic in terms of ORMs, Testing/Mock frameworks, rendering platform etc. [0] - http://padrinorb.com http://padrinorb.com
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  I've done RoR stuff and something about "doing-things-the-rails-way" bugs me to no end. After being paid to work on a RoR app I started to hate Ruby. Some time after I wrote something small and silly for my thesis (to visualize some data and give my classmates something to play with) in Sinatra and it rekindled my love for the language. Something I can't really put my finger on just rubs me in the wrong way in Rails, but using Sinatra felt like shattering chains that were holding me back. Maybe it was partly that I was learning NodeJS at the time, I dunno, but I can't recommend Sinatra enough. This being said I have zero experience with Sinatra in an production environment, so take this anecdote with a shovel(s) of salt.
vidarh 9y ago
Similar here. I've used Ruby since 2005, but mostly for backend code, with a sprinkling of Sinatra for my web projects. Sinatra is spartan compared to Rails, sure, but it also means you get to bring just the components you need, and Sinatra is tiny enough to just read the code if you don't understand exactly what's going on. In fact, before Sinatra, I had a couple of projects where I used Camping - _why's micro-framework for the same reason: It brought just the bare minimum, and you could hold all of what it did in your head with ease. I don't quite have the same hate for Rails, I think. If a client asks for it, I'd consider it. But I also usually tell them I'd rather refer them elsewhere.

owebmaster 9y ago

Back in 2008 Rails was the real fun. And their proposed way of doing web software was mainstream until angularjs exploded.

bauerd 9y ago
Angular is a frontend framework, Rails is a backend framework. Care to elaborate?
- vectorpush 9y ago
  Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion. SPAs manage state and template rendering on the front-end, so much of the Rails machinery becomes unnecessary. You can still use Rails to implement your JSON API backend, but the simplicity of something like Sinatra is often preferable since you're increasing the complexity on the front. The node+react+webpack combo gave web devs the power to process application states and render the UI on the front-end and the back-end using the same code; a feat that is not possible at all with Rails pushing it a little further out of fashion. Of course, the SPA suffers plenty of criticism, and Rails is still a popular choice with and without an SPA on the front-end, but I think it's fair to say that Rails is no longer the "fun" way to do things (though the most fun doesn't mean the best business or engineering solution).
  - jholman 9y ago
    I agree with all of the major points of your comment, but I have a quibble: > Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion I dunno that Angular is the relevant point here. Rails (late 2005? I think?) post-dates the public existence of Gmail (public April 2004), a wildly popular SPA. It also post-dates the existence of Google Maps (early 2005). The famous blog post by Jesse James Garrett that coined the acronym "AJAX" is also from early 2005. The thing that Rails does well was already largely-obsolete before Rails was open-sourced. (Though that is one state-of-the-art buggy whip! Very impressive!)
    - vectorpush 9y ago
      I absolutely agree that the SPA was already a thing before angular, in fact, angular was specifically designed to wrangle the general design concerns related to building SPAs and doing so sold the distinct concept of the SPA to many developers.
- hkjgkjy 9y ago
  The difference between front and backend web applications is nothing more but where the views are rendered - which on client side also means managing state and IO. This means Rails and Angular are doing the same job - the main difference is where data keeping and rendering is done.
  - bauerd 9y ago
    I disagree. For data persistence one still needs to talk to a backend. What sets Rails and Angular apart is not only view/template rendering.
    - wwweston 9y ago
      Both Angular and Rails talk to "a backend." In Angular's case it's (probably) an HTTP server handing over JSON representation of data. In Rails' case it might well be exactly the same thing, or it might well be a NoSQL database handing over JSON representations of data, or it might be an SQL database. You can certainly make distinctions between those data stores, but they have enough in common it's perfectly reasonable to say they're doing many of the same things. Now, Angular is considerably more horrible than Rails and tries to solve some additional front end problems badly, and its use is a likely indicator that the organization or individual that have decided to employ it aren't capable of making wise technical decisions, so I'd say it's also reasonable to make distinctions between the two on a number of levels. But there's considerable overlap in the kinds of problems they attempt to solve.
      - dasil003 9y ago
        The difference is Rails can handle both the front-end and backend of a typical web application, whereas Angular is just the front-end. Equating Rails data store backend to Angular's service backend is a poor analogy. The concepts and principles behind web browser client code, server-side application code, and data stores are 3 completely different engineering paradigms.
        wwweston 9y ago

copperx 9y ago

Now I'm really curious. What framework would you prefer to use build a webapp? I'm looking for Rails alternatives.

prh8 9y ago
If you want something comparable (feature wise) to Rails, then check out Hanami. It's much better designed for large apps. If you are looking for a micro framework, I'd suggest Roda. I'd characterize those two as the modern replacements for Rails/Sinatra.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Took a brief look at Hanami. Is it optimised for deployment to Heroku only? Or does it support AWS Elastic Beanstalk also?
  - prh8 9y ago
    It is just like any other Rack based app, can be deployed anywhere.
cyberferret 9y ago
For some reason, I could never get the hang of Rails. But when I found Sinatra, it all made perfect sense to me. Now I exclusively use Padrino [0] as the framework to build all my web apps. It is a framework on top of Sinatra that gives you a lot of the Rails goodness, but allows you to be really agnostic in terms of ORMs, Testing/Mock frameworks, rendering platform etc. [0] - http://padrinorb.com http://padrinorb.com
nextlevelwizard 9y ago
I've done RoR stuff and something about "doing-things-the-rails-way" bugs me to no end. After being paid to work on a RoR app I started to hate Ruby. Some time after I wrote something small and silly for my thesis (to visualize some data and give my classmates something to play with) in Sinatra and it rekindled my love for the language. Something I can't really put my finger on just rubs me in the wrong way in Rails, but using Sinatra felt like shattering chains that were holding me back. Maybe it was partly that I was learning NodeJS at the time, I dunno, but I can't recommend Sinatra enough. This being said I have zero experience with Sinatra in an production environment, so take this anecdote with a shovel(s) of salt.

vidarh 9y ago

Similar here. I've used Ruby since 2005, but mostly for backend code, with a sprinkling of Sinatra for my web projects. Sinatra is spartan compared to Rails, sure, but it also means you get to bring just the components you need, and Sinatra is tiny enough to just read the code if you don't understand exactly what's going on. In fact, before Sinatra, I had a couple of projects where I used Camping - _why's micro-framework for the same reason: It brought just the bare minimum, and you could hold all of what it did in your head with ease. I don't quite have the same hate for Rails, I think. If a client asks for it, I'd consider it. But I also usually tell them I'd rather refer them elsewhere.