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IMO Ruby on Rails remains the "uncomplicated" standard for building full-stack apps. Especially notion-like CRUD apps. It's fast, uncomplicated (convention over
by dcchambers 4y ago
IMO Ruby on Rails remains the "uncomplicated" standard for building full-stack apps. Especially notion-like CRUD apps. It's fast, uncomplicated (convention over configuration), and enjoyable to write apps in once you understand the basics. I still think Ruby is an incredibly fun language to write in.
You mention that you get frustrated by modern web dev - I assume you mean the insane world of javascript frameworks. You can build entire rails apps without ever really worrying about JS these days.[^1] Hotwired lets you build fairly complex UIs and add a ton of interactivity without JS. But if you ever want to do more with JS on the frontend it's very easy to adapt rails to just about any frontend JS framework, including React and Svelte.
That said, there's comparable full-stack frameworks in many languages, and if you just want to hit the ground running you might as well use what you know. Ruby - Rails. Java - Spring. Python - Django. PHP - Laravel. You can use whatever frontend you want with any of those frameworks.
Stick with Postgres or Mysql/Maria for the database. They're tried-and-true and scale to whatever size you will ever need.
[^1]: https://hotwired.dev/ https://hotwired.dev/
- hyperhopper 4y agoRuby doesn't have the typing required to be a pleasant modern language
- ravenstine 4y agoTypes aren't everything to everyone.
- dcchambers 4y agoI haven't used it personally but if you're looking for type-checked Ruby, look into Sorbet from the folks at Stripe. - https://stripe.com/blog/sorbet-stripes-type-checker-for-ruby https://stripe.com/blog/sorbet-stripes-type-checker-for-ruby - https://sorbet.org/ https://sorbet.org/
- tiffanyh 4y agoDeploying though is very complicated.
- foobazzy 4y agoYou might want to check out fly.io https://fly.io/docs/rails/ https://fly.io/docs/rails/
- abadger9 4y agoI started my career in RoR and regret doing so - I really had no idea what was going on, found a gem for everything, and understood very little about performance tuning other than some nuances about ActiveRecord. I wish I started with React+Python/Django, would be incredibly marketable.
- dcchambers 4y agoI see way more job opportunities in Rails than Django, but I guess it depends what kinds of circles you run in. I don't care much for frontend development so I have stayed away from React, but yeah that's certainly the skill to have for frontend work these days. React+Rails makes you insanely marketable these days. There's SO MANY companies with large rails apps out there that aren't going anywhere.
- abadger9 4y agoThat's interesting to hear, I didn't know Rails was a growing community. I haven't gone to public tech talks in sf in a while (3 years before covid), so wouldn't have as updated pulse on the market. Fwiw, the best advice i got in my short stint as a ruby developer was to check out "Destroy All Software" - https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog - the strongest engineer I knew loved it, hope it helps someone out
- jacknews 4y agoI don't know if it's a growing community, but whatever it's doing now, it's starting from a fairly large base compared to many others.
- jsyolo 4y agoI'm not a fan SPAs for everything but something like notion has to be a SPA. I don't see how prioritizing backend frameworks as the most important part helps here.
- dcchambers 4y agoOP asked for a full stack solution so that's what I gave him. There's no reason you can't use rails and something like react on the frontend for building a SPA Notion clone. Rails may seem like overkill for an API-only mode but I think it's perfectly useable and pleasant to develop that way. Just did a quick google search and this is the first result I found: https://github.com/brandonfang/lilnotion https://github.com/brandonfang/lilnotion