3 ms·

I'll take Rails + turbolinks over this tangled mess any day.

by cutler 8y ago

tomc1985 8y ago
A thousand times yes! I am amazed that nobody seems to look at that chart and say, "holy shit, how much of this is necessary? how much of this is good?"
- cutler 8y ago
  I'd love to see a contest between a bunch of devs using Rails + turbolinks pitted against a team using React + Redux + Express measuring how many working apps they could produce in a weekend. I know which team I'd be betting on. Server-side rendering has to be the biggest joke. I mean you spend half a lifetime mastering the art of pushing everything onto the client and then realise it borks your SEO because it breaks what the WWW is based on - hypertext. So you now have to go back and duplicate everything on the server. That's progress?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - amalag 8y ago
    Exactly what Sam Stephenson talked about here: https://youtu.be/SWEts0rlezA?t=6m36s https://youtu.be/SWEts0rlezA?t=6m36s
  - ravenstine 8y ago
    It's a complicated issue because it of course depends on how reliant a product is on SEO. Maybe certain pages that bring in views from search engines shouldn't be part of the same client-side application in the first place, but if it must be then the developers have to decide if they're building a SPA to actually hand off workload to the client or because they want to use React. :) But to the point of the person you were replying to, we definitely overcomplicate web development these days. There are some good reasons for this, like the fact that there's so much competition to contend with(so we all feel like we have to be rockstars), but it's good to remind ourselves that the end goal shouldn't be focused around the tools.
amalag 8y ago
Absolutely. There are so few places where you actually need an SPA. And now with form_with doing remote forms by default and getting inline responses from the server it is a real stretch for someone to say they absolutely need some of these JS frameworks to get some simple non page load functionality.
- tptacek 8y ago
  There's something to this complaint, in that I actually rarely want an SPA either --- I usually want something that behaves like a damn web page. But having had several years of experience building web applications in Rails, handing data carefully between templates and controller code and managing the leaky abstractions for those places I actually had to use Javascript, I do not miss that experience at all. I'm not a front-end developer (I do it when I have to) and I am 3-5X more productive in React than I ever was at Rails front-end. If that's the return a nonspecialist gets from the React stack, I can only assume someone who specializes in it does even better.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Similar datapoint here. I was never a Rails guy, my server-side comfort zone was always on the JVM, but React makes me so much more productive than I ever was before. I'm definitely not a frontend developer; I keep up with it because as a devops consultant I sometimes have to care, but my primary interests are server-side. When I have to slam out a web frontend to something, nothing I've ever used is faster than React, and nothing I've ever used feels as good when I'm actually using the application. SEO? Sure, that's a problem...for web sites. I mostly make applications, though, and people who want it are the people who are looking for it.

I'll take Rails + turbolinks over this tangled mess any day.

by cutler 8y ago

I'll take Rails + turbolinks over this tangled mess any day.

tomc1985 8y ago

A thousand times yes! I am amazed that nobody seems to look at that chart and say, "holy shit, how much of this is necessary? how much of this is good?"

cutler 8y ago
I'd love to see a contest between a bunch of devs using Rails + turbolinks pitted against a team using React + Redux + Express measuring how many working apps they could produce in a weekend. I know which team I'd be betting on. Server-side rendering has to be the biggest joke. I mean you spend half a lifetime mastering the art of pushing everything onto the client and then realise it borks your SEO because it breaks what the WWW is based on - hypertext. So you now have to go back and duplicate everything on the server. That's progress?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- amalag 8y ago
  Exactly what Sam Stephenson talked about here: https://youtu.be/SWEts0rlezA?t=6m36s https://youtu.be/SWEts0rlezA?t=6m36s
- ravenstine 8y ago
  It's a complicated issue because it of course depends on how reliant a product is on SEO. Maybe certain pages that bring in views from search engines shouldn't be part of the same client-side application in the first place, but if it must be then the developers have to decide if they're building a SPA to actually hand off workload to the client or because they want to use React. :) But to the point of the person you were replying to, we definitely overcomplicate web development these days. There are some good reasons for this, like the fact that there's so much competition to contend with(so we all feel like we have to be rockstars), but it's good to remind ourselves that the end goal shouldn't be focused around the tools.

amalag 8y ago

Absolutely. There are so few places where you actually need an SPA. And now with form_with doing remote forms by default and getting inline responses from the server it is a real stretch for someone to say they absolutely need some of these JS frameworks to get some simple non page load functionality.

tptacek 8y ago
There's something to this complaint, in that I actually rarely want an SPA either --- I usually want something that behaves like a damn web page. But having had several years of experience building web applications in Rails, handing data carefully between templates and controller code and managing the leaky abstractions for those places I actually had to use Javascript, I do not miss that experience at all. I'm not a front-end developer (I do it when I have to) and I am 3-5X more productive in React than I ever was at Rails front-end. If that's the return a nonspecialist gets from the React stack, I can only assume someone who specializes in it does even better.
- eropple 8y ago
  Similar datapoint here. I was never a Rails guy, my server-side comfort zone was always on the JVM, but React makes me so much more productive than I ever was before. I'm definitely not a frontend developer; I keep up with it because as a devops consultant I sometimes have to care, but my primary interests are server-side. When I have to slam out a web frontend to something, nothing I've ever used is faster than React, and nothing I've ever used feels as good when I'm actually using the application. SEO? Sure, that's a problem...for web sites. I mostly make applications, though, and people who want it are the people who are looking for it.