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I originally started my career as a Rails developer, and for the last few years have been doing more frontend JavaScript (React), as that's where the €€€ is. Fo

by fyfy18 7y ago

I originally started my career as a Rails developer, and for the last few years have been doing more frontend JavaScript (React), as that's where the €€€ is. For all of the projects I've worked on, server-side rendered Rails would have been a much better stack choice. It would have been quicker to develop for, easier to hire for, and more performant to the end user. Now I'm not trying to say this works for everyone, maybe when you get to unicorn scale it makes sense to do something different, but these are small projects with no more than a handful of developers. Hiring React developers is easy, hiring Rails developers is easy, but hiring developers who know both well is much harder. Most of the projects have been for pre-revenue startups, so what's important at that stage is speed of development. You really can't beat Rails for development speed of CRUD applications (which let's be honest, most apps are), and then you can add a sprinkling of JavaScript on top for some modern features (and with something like react-rails you can easily integrate React). If at a later stage you need an API for mobile applications, Rails makes that easy (you can even share the same code for API endpoints and regular HTML views). In terms of performance, at this stage of a company you can get pretty far by horizontal scaling. Rails is a fairly mature framework, so it's easy to maintain and isn't going to introduce any breaking changes anytime soon - compare this to one of the projects I worked on, which is stuck on React 15 with vanilla JS and probably will never be upgraded. Now just to repeat I'm not saying this works for everyone. Another project I recently worked on was a React + Typescript app. There was already an existing GraphQL endpoint and it needed a lot of interactivity, so Rails wouldn't have been a good choice here. But for a lot of projects I'd say that server-side rendered Rails is a better choice. it may not be sexy anymore, but if you are a startup and want to get something done fast and for it to be maintainable, it's probably the right choice.

candiodari 7y ago
I wish more people would think like this. Javascript only gains you in latency if you handle things locally - which nobody does. That means that server-side rendering beats pretty much all SPA's, and somehow nobody cares. And if a client action results in 5 requests, as it often does, then server-side rendering is a lot faster. Or to put it directly: craigslist is faster than amazon.com. And, frankly, more fun to use.

by fyfy18 7y ago

candiodari 7y ago

I wish more people would think like this. Javascript only gains you in latency if you handle things locally - which nobody does. That means that server-side rendering beats pretty much all SPA's, and somehow nobody cares. And if a client action results in 5 requests, as it often does, then server-side rendering is a lot faster. Or to put it directly: craigslist is faster than amazon.com. And, frankly, more fun to use.