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> If you want to go with “battle-hardened and industry-proven”, use the Spring ecosystem. Well, uh, there it is. </Goldblum> As a Rails fan who was forced to

> If you want to go with “battle-hardened and industry-proven”, use the Spring ecosystem. Well, uh, there it is. </Goldblum> As a Rails fan who was forced to use Java for a web application at a previous job, I've been all over this whole topic, and even ranted about it on this site a couple times. This is the conclusion I came to: some people like to have things done for them by a framework, valuing the tradeoff of time vs. specificity, and some people like to write a lot of extra code themselves, valuing the precision that affords, at the expense of time. The working example I took away from the exercise was that writing a simple edit page with a nested model. It took me 3 lines of code in Rails, with a few dozen more from the generators. (Cocoon is freaking magical.) In Java/Spring/Node.js, it took me 160, and I still wasn't done. I needed repeated classes, controllers, and services in 2 languages in 2 stacks. One of the arguments I see a lot in this field is how people are fans of strict types in the Java world. OK, but it seems to be a requirement to keep Java and Javascript sorted, and is a non-trivial amount of work to keep in sync. Some people get hung up on, say, race conditions of database validations, or mock database transparency as useless, or argue about which ecosystem has more plugins (Node "wins!"), and some people think it's ridiculous to duplicate 90% of the plumbing, or hate having to deal with migrations manually, or find it inconceivable that there's not one single canonical example of a working Spring/Node CRUD app in a current version of the stack available on the entirety of the internet. To the last point: THAT is how fragmented the "Spring" world is to learn and apply. THIS is the tradeoff in NOT being opinionated. In nine months of pulling my hair out, I never once found 2 examples that did ANYTHING the same way, and NOTHING was current and complete, not even stuff by Matt Raible. I even contacted him directly, and the best he could do was point me at a GitHub project I had never been able to bubble up with Google, which was 3 versions out of date, and would no longer work the same way with current versions of the stack. To each their own. Horses for courses. Your milage may vary. Terms and conditions may apply. It's almost like a "right-left" dichotomy of politics. Anyway, I leveled up my career, and now I get to pick what tools I use. But, yes, I'm still bitter on this topic. ;-)

philwelch 8y ago
My point wasn’t to use Spring, my point is that it’s ludicrous to refer to Rails as “battle-tested” when most people who test it abandon their Rails prototype eventually anyway. My actual advice is probably that every stack sucks, but some stacks at least get out of your way. > The working example I took away from the exercise was that writing a simple edit page with a nested model. It took me 3 lines of code in Rails, with a few dozen more from the generators.... > Some people get hung up on, say, race conditions of database validations Because those race conditions mean that your cute three-line edit page is eventually going to turn into a hundreds-of-lines monstrosity if you actually try to put it into production. Rails is a great rapid prototyping framework, granted, but once you try and run a Rails app in production, you’re still face-first in all the complexity Rails pretends to handle for you when it’s just localhost:3000.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  I've made at least a dozen LOB Rails apps for internal use at companies. I also worked at a bespoke consultancy that made Rails sites for startups, and I've seen dozens of Rails apps "in production," out on the open internet, and making money for their owners. I think there may be some conflation here between "production" and "Twitter- or Facebook-scale production." And I wouldn't trust ANY framework to applications at that scale.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    Even for internal use, you have to worry about data integrity a lot of the time. > I also worked at a bespoke consultancy that made Rails sites for startups Ah, so didn't have to handle the maintenance burden afterwards. I did. Rails is awesome if you can just dump the maintenance burden on someone else and move on.
    - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
      Wha...? Honestly, the presumption on this board sometimes. I was one of the 2 people who maintained the apps on AWS. There were no issues. I guess we've just had VERY different experiences.

philwelch 8y ago

My point wasn’t to use Spring, my point is that it’s ludicrous to refer to Rails as “battle-tested” when most people who test it abandon their Rails prototype eventually anyway. My actual advice is probably that every stack sucks, but some stacks at least get out of your way. > The working example I took away from the exercise was that writing a simple edit page with a nested model. It took me 3 lines of code in Rails, with a few dozen more from the generators.... > Some people get hung up on, say, race conditions of database validations Because those race conditions mean that your cute three-line edit page is eventually going to turn into a hundreds-of-lines monstrosity if you actually try to put it into production. Rails is a great rapid prototyping framework, granted, but once you try and run a Rails app in production, you’re still face-first in all the complexity Rails pretends to handle for you when it’s just localhost:3000.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
I've made at least a dozen LOB Rails apps for internal use at companies. I also worked at a bespoke consultancy that made Rails sites for startups, and I've seen dozens of Rails apps "in production," out on the open internet, and making money for their owners. I think there may be some conflation here between "production" and "Twitter- or Facebook-scale production." And I wouldn't trust ANY framework to applications at that scale.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Even for internal use, you have to worry about data integrity a lot of the time. > I also worked at a bespoke consultancy that made Rails sites for startups Ah, so didn't have to handle the maintenance burden afterwards. I did. Rails is awesome if you can just dump the maintenance burden on someone else and move on.
  - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
    Wha...? Honestly, the presumption on this board sometimes. I was one of the 2 people who maintained the apps on AWS. There were no issues. I guess we've just had VERY different experiences.