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I am still holding my breath for a Node framework that does everything Django does for me. Honestly, we are most of the way there but for three holdouts; 0 con

I am still holding my breath for a Node framework that does everything Django does for me. Honestly, we are most of the way there but for three holdouts; 0 config auth, easily extensible admin, and migrations. User stuff isn't so bad with bcrypt but I'd really like to be able to type `framework create superuser` and `framework create user` instead of fiddling with user access and re-imaging user groups and permissions for the hundredth time. Admin stuff always seems to be something relegated to a separate tool. No, please, please, please include it in the framework. Most frameworks have you choose your own ORM (which is fine if they consistently use the same one in documentation), but for some reason Node ORMS always treat migrations as an afterthought or second class citizen (if they even consider it). Changing table structures in development to add a new column? Half of them just say, sorry, we're going to have to blow that away. The rest have either manual migrations or partially automated migrations written in the SQL dialect you happen to be using during development. My favorite of the lot I've seen so far is Prisma and even they have recently indicated they don't want to support transactions in migrations because they don't want to give you a "false sense of security" (well yeah, how about a real sense of security?). To be fair, even in python land Django is really the only one to have ever gotten migrations 100% right.

tomduncalf 4y ago
This is exactly why I used RoR for a recent freelance project which required a fairly simple (but full featured, user accounts etc) backend despite being a JS developer for the last 15 years and not really having any Ruby experience. None of the Node options seemed to cover all the bases and/or inspire trust, and I didn’t feel much like piecing together a bunch of random modules for a small project. Overall I guess it was a mixed experience, I missed the JS language (just because I know it well, Ruby has a lot more syntax) and Typescript but I liked having all the things like auth, migrations etc. which are not my speciality taken care of in a way that I could trust and easily Google thanks to it being so widely used. I’m not 100% sure if I’d make the same choice again, the mental overhead of going to a language I don’t usually use to make changes is a downside as is the lack of type checking (though I believe there are better options in the Ruby world now), but on the other hand I could do the whole thing with very little code (relatively) and it was a good experience to see just how much work a well designed framework can save you. I should add I did try Django but had my heart set on GraphQL (just because I wanted to try using it for real) and the options in the Python ecosystem didn’t scale well. Overall I liked Django’s ORM better and the Python language, but I felt like you got more out of the box with RoR, the ecosystem is higher quality, and I had to do fewer hacks to get stuff working. All depends on the scale of the project and how much code you want to write I guess.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I'd kind of like to try Ruby on Rails but python was my first language and I was very, very green when I first tried to make a website so Django was a natural choice. It's served me well. I think remix.run is a pretty great framework, all things considered. You could always use Django or RoR to manage the database and use Prisma to inspect the schema. There are some downsides to that (you have to mess with bcrypt to get passwords to work the same on the node and python side), but might be a good compromise.

tomduncalf 4y ago

This is exactly why I used RoR for a recent freelance project which required a fairly simple (but full featured, user accounts etc) backend despite being a JS developer for the last 15 years and not really having any Ruby experience. None of the Node options seemed to cover all the bases and/or inspire trust, and I didn’t feel much like piecing together a bunch of random modules for a small project. Overall I guess it was a mixed experience, I missed the JS language (just because I know it well, Ruby has a lot more syntax) and Typescript but I liked having all the things like auth, migrations etc. which are not my speciality taken care of in a way that I could trust and easily Google thanks to it being so widely used. I’m not 100% sure if I’d make the same choice again, the mental overhead of going to a language I don’t usually use to make changes is a downside as is the lack of type checking (though I believe there are better options in the Ruby world now), but on the other hand I could do the whole thing with very little code (relatively) and it was a good experience to see just how much work a well designed framework can save you. I should add I did try Django but had my heart set on GraphQL (just because I wanted to try using it for real) and the options in the Python ecosystem didn’t scale well. Overall I liked Django’s ORM better and the Python language, but I felt like you got more out of the box with RoR, the ecosystem is higher quality, and I had to do fewer hacks to get stuff working. All depends on the scale of the project and how much code you want to write I guess.

DangitBobby 4y ago
I'd kind of like to try Ruby on Rails but python was my first language and I was very, very green when I first tried to make a website so Django was a natural choice. It's served me well. I think remix.run is a pretty great framework, all things considered. You could always use Django or RoR to manage the database and use Prisma to inspect the schema. There are some downsides to that (you have to mess with bcrypt to get passwords to work the same on the node and python side), but might be a good compromise.