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It’s been a few years since I’ve used Rails, but when I did, it always felt like within a year or two a new version of Rails would come out and I’d basically ha

It’s been a few years since I’ve used Rails, but when I did, it always felt like within a year or two a new version of Rails would come out and I’d basically have to rewrite the site from scratch if I wanted to update. I don’t know if the codebase has stabilized but the transition between 2.x to 3.x to 4.x was pretty rocky from my recollection. Hopefully it’s better, since Rails is probably the best framework to get a site up and running quickly.

websitescenes 8y ago
Since v3 I’ve had no issues upgrading apps to the latest. As soon as a new release is available, I upgrade. V2 to v3 was pretty painful though..
- rapind 8y ago
  Specifically the change in the default to escape strings and having to specify when you want to pass it through unsafely (html_safe / raw). Broke a lot of v2 apps, but ultimately I think it was definitely the right call. Same thing again when strong_params become the default. So mostly due to security improvements. v2 -> v3 also was the merb merging and a pretty significant rewrite, so it's pretty impressive that we didn't have even more trouble IMO.
dasil003 8y ago
I've been using Rails since before 1.0 and the upgrade pain has decreased significantly over time. The worst upgrade I had was 3.0 to 3.1 where there was a performance regression that caused my test suite to go from 15 mins to about 8 hours on ruby 1.8.7, so I had to simultaneously upgrade to 1.9.3 at the same time. That involved YAML parser changes which I didn't catch before corrupting some serialized data in the DB. Since that time both ruby and rails have stabilized their upgrades significantly. The biggest issue since then was updating to strong params, and that was only an issue for apps with a large CRUD surface area. These days I think Rails is the perfect balance of stable and flexible for a wide swath of prototypes and apps. The areas where I'd look for an alternative would be web sockets, heavy concurrency (ie. needing more than background workers), or where raw compute is the bottleneck.
swerveonem 8y ago
If you truly had to rewrite from scratch you did something wrong, the APIs are not vastly different.

websitescenes 8y ago

Since v3 I’ve had no issues upgrading apps to the latest. As soon as a new release is available, I upgrade. V2 to v3 was pretty painful though..

rapind 8y ago
Specifically the change in the default to escape strings and having to specify when you want to pass it through unsafely (html_safe / raw). Broke a lot of v2 apps, but ultimately I think it was definitely the right call. Same thing again when strong_params become the default. So mostly due to security improvements. v2 -> v3 also was the merb merging and a pretty significant rewrite, so it's pretty impressive that we didn't have even more trouble IMO.

dasil003 8y ago

I've been using Rails since before 1.0 and the upgrade pain has decreased significantly over time. The worst upgrade I had was 3.0 to 3.1 where there was a performance regression that caused my test suite to go from 15 mins to about 8 hours on ruby 1.8.7, so I had to simultaneously upgrade to 1.9.3 at the same time. That involved YAML parser changes which I didn't catch before corrupting some serialized data in the DB. Since that time both ruby and rails have stabilized their upgrades significantly. The biggest issue since then was updating to strong params, and that was only an issue for apps with a large CRUD surface area. These days I think Rails is the perfect balance of stable and flexible for a wide swath of prototypes and apps. The areas where I'd look for an alternative would be web sockets, heavy concurrency (ie. needing more than background workers), or where raw compute is the bottleneck.

swerveonem 8y ago

If you truly had to rewrite from scratch you did something wrong, the APIs are not vastly different.