3 ms·

Having built with node, ruby, python, php and even did a web services framework in node, I can say that the author is both right and wrong. Right - node is fast

Having built with node, ruby, python, php and even did a web services framework in node, I can say that the author is both right and wrong. Right - node is fast/faster and that rails is probably overkill for making web api stuff. Wrong - single page apps are the future. I write single page apps, especially mobile JS apps, BUT rails style frameworks are still incredibly important for 1 huge reason - search engines. If you have a content site, you will have a web front end that is indexible for at least the next 5-10 years. Single page apps are not as indexible/crawlable yet. So, will you write some single page apps? Yes, are they the one true future, no. The future is probably a combination of native apps on various devices, a traditional web front that is indexable, and probably some single page javascript stuff powering admin panels and highly interactive portions of your site that don't need to be indexable. For example, in creating ReMeme (http://reme.me http://reme.me) it has a web front that is indexable by google, it has mobile apps and the whole thing is backend API driven by a sinatra app. At this point I have potentially 4 different platforms talking to the api, not just a "single page web app". If it ever gets on more mobile platforms or even on the desktop, that's even more. The web's a big deal and will stay that way, but you'll probably find yourself writing a bunch of interfaces in different languages, platforms, etc. before you know it. Rails vs. single page isn't the debate. Pick a tool and ship your API, it doesn't matter if it's rails or node or python or php. Once you ship your API, your bigger problem will be how do you manage the complexity of developing for so many platforms?

stdbrouw 14y ago
> BUT rails style frameworks are still incredibly important for 1 huge reason - search engines. A project I toyed with a while ago, but never finished (because I don't need it right now), was an app server that can render and serve Backbone views on the server, for search engines and to speed up the first page load (after which most clients would switch to client-side rendering.) See https://github.com/stdbrouw/backbone-express https://github.com/stdbrouw/backbone-express. https://github.com/developmentseed/bones https://github.com/developmentseed/bones does something similar. There's a ton of reasons why people would want to stick with Rails or another server-side framework, but searchability isn't necessarily the big problem.

stdbrouw 14y ago

> BUT rails style frameworks are still incredibly important for 1 huge reason - search engines. A project I toyed with a while ago, but never finished (because I don't need it right now), was an app server that can render and serve Backbone views on the server, for search engines and to speed up the first page load (after which most clients would switch to client-side rendering.) See https://github.com/stdbrouw/backbone-express https://github.com/stdbrouw/backbone-express. https://github.com/developmentseed/bones https://github.com/developmentseed/bones does something similar. There's a ton of reasons why people would want to stick with Rails or another server-side framework, but searchability isn't necessarily the big problem.