6 ms·

Rails 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 have been released

79 points by mlitwiniuk 11y ago

buren 11y ago
I really like that the Rails team is pretty good at doing regular releases. One noticeable thing though is that ActiveRecord, almost, always has more fixes than the other Action* gems combined, understandable since its the most complicated piece, but I can't help to think of Ernie Millers ActiveRecord talk a few years back. https://youtu.be/yuh9COzp5voA https://youtu.be/yuh9COzp5voA (A few of the things that he talks about are since then fixed..)
- stevepike 11y ago
  Wow, this is a really great talk for anyone using rails. Ernie Miller manages to dissect a few gnarly parts of ActiveRecord while keeping it positive and constructive.
gshakir 11y ago
Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.
- aeze 11y ago
  Sure it's still a relevant option. You can integrate the current popular frontend frameworks easily if you want. It provides a relatively painless and speedy development experience.
- jherdman 11y ago
  Absolutely! We're using Rails at Precision Nutrition. We use it to serve up a JSON API, and in a more traditional sense with ERb templates. We're finding it to be incredibly productive, and more than performant for our needs — especially when you couple it with Postgresql.
- dham 11y ago
  Yes
  - gshakir 11y ago
    Thank you, so Rails would be a front runner choice for you when developing a new web application?
    - dham 11y ago
      Rails continues to include things that most developers need when building a web application or api. While most people are arguing about web framework speeds Rails has been putting in features that are useful, like mail previews, strong params, async emailing, Russian doll fragment caching(nice if your still doing traditional templates, can be used with JSON rendering too). The community also has very nice and mature libraries for doing authentication, authorization, audit trail, and uploading. Not to mention, testing is in out of the box.
    - jrochkind1 11y ago
      It depends. But yes, Rails is certainly "still relevant".
    - aikah 11y ago
      Use the right tool for the job. If your project is just a REST api then Rails might not be the right choice. If you're writing a complex CMS/CRM,ecommerce site,or anything that has a complex UI from scratch, then rails and ruby's gigantic ecosystem will set you up and running in no time. But so can Spring,Django or Symfony if you know them from the inside out.
- danso 11y ago
  > and looks like there are better alternatives now. ...such as? It'd help to know what you consider to be "better alternatives" because it gives scope to what your priorities are. I've seen discussions in which people say, "Well now there's Sinatra"...which is fine, but that's more of an opinion about "Lightweight projects and systems are nicer" rather than "Sinatra is better than Rails". I used to use Rails all the time but now I do most data projects in Middleman...but that's because I prioritize static builds and front-end engineering and most importantly, simplified my data infrastructure so that it can be represented as a spreadsheet or plaintext YAML...but that's not something applicable to all projects. One of the most valuable parts of Rails is its opinionated infrastructure...and I think that's helped it be a little more nimble from version to version.
  - gshakir 11y ago
    Better alternatives could be one of NodeJS frameworks, Play in Scala and Dropwizard for Java. They could be better in the sense, that I can share a JS library between the API and Frontend or I can share a JVM library between the API/Infrastructure layer.
    - ch4s3 11y ago
      So I've been using Rails in production for a few years now, and its pretty good. I'm sure there are better options for a number of specific domains. I also use Dropwizard(because I need to use a few java only libraries) and dropwizard is in no way better than rails, except in the number of requests per second it can handle. It is a pain to set up compared to rails, the docs are terrible, it forces you to use maven and they refuse to help you with gradle. There are very few Stack Overflow answers, and thats a problem, because Dropwizard offers few sensible defaults, its configuration all the way down. And generally, the lack of livereload makes web development a pain in java. Can't speak to Play though.
      - vorg 11y ago
        > Dropwizard [...] forces you to use maven and they refuse to help you with gradle The configuration syntax (YAML) shown in https://dropwizard.github.io/dropwizard/manual/configuration.html https://dropwizard.github.io/dropwizard/manual/configuration... looks quite nice. It says there you can use JSON instead. The syntax Gradle uses (i.e. Groovy) has a lot of cruft, including even a full programming language, which can be misused in build config files so best steer clear.
- jbhatab 11y ago
  No question, yes. I use quite a rich front end frameworks, but rails still shines for lots of use cases.
- kentt 11y ago
  Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
  - lolhackernews 11y ago
    It's not easy at all. I mean, if you are filling in the generated scaffolds, it may be easy. But when your coworkers start using all the nasty routing DSL tricks and the myriad of helpers, it stops being easy. Thing is, it's too big and rich for its own good, and let's not speak of the development practices it encourages.
  - lettergram 11y ago
    I just started learning it this week and it isn't bad... However, there's quite a bit of setup, and it's a bit tricky at first. Basically, a few years ago I thought it was easier to build my own framework in Golang, C, C++. I've also used PHP, Node and Flask from time to time. After doing all that, I had a pretty good understanding in how it all works, and can see the beauty in some of the way Rails works. I definitely think it'll keep growing and is worth learning if you're into web development.
  - gshakir 11y ago
    That is the problem with rails. It starts off easy when you are just making CRUDs and as the code grows bigger, you have to know a lot on how the framework works and that's where the learning curve hits you.
  - bphogan 11y ago
    It's easy if you stick with vanilla Rails. Where it gets complicated is if your team decides to use a different view language, a decorator gem, a factory framework, and a different testing framework. The more deviations from Rails proper, the higher the learning curve gets. If a person know Git, HTML, JavaScript, and one server-side language, I can teach them enough Rails to build production apps in a few weeks. I've had a lot of success with that.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > there is a steep learning curve citing the parent no that's bullshit, just do the rails tutorial online and you'll be good to go. OF course you need to know Ruby. Like with any other language, you can't just learn the framework.
- dfischer 11y ago
  Rich front-end frameworks handles exactly that, the front-end. Rails is still an excellent choice for the back-end and serving up those APIs to those "rich front end frameworks."
- damoncali 11y ago
  I've been using Rails since 1.1 or so. It was the first framework I picked up, and the learning curve was steep for me (I didn't even know what a GET was at the time). It is much more involved now. Before there was no bundler, no asset pipeline or compiled assets of any kind. Javascript was an afterthought. There were no real choices to make. Railscasts was active. This was huge. Repeating for emphasis. Railscasts was huge for me. There were a few headscratchers along the way - RJS, components, maybe a few other oddities (I think turbolinks falls into this category), but they tend to get removed as time goes on if they don't work for a lot of people. The Rails team may get pretty enthusiastic about some weird stuff now and then, but they're also pretty good about reversing their mistakes. They seemed to have learned from the 2->3 transition hell as well. Upgrades are fairly painless now. That said, it's still very much relevant. It's been polished to the point where you can really do a lot with very little work. There are solid, well maintained gems that do lots of common tasks (although there are a few things that are strangely missing from the community). The REST convention is very powerful, and the code is easy to follow. I resisted the move towards complex js front end frameworks because I was tired of figuring out which one to learn. That hasn't changed. I abhor the pace of js framework development - I can't justify learning a lot of it from a business perspective. It is just too unstable. I have clients using Rails apps I wrote 7 years ago that are still very maintainable, and that is great. When I need complex UI's I take a hybrid approach and have rails load miniature angular apps on a page by page basis. If the view is complex enough, I have it load up a single file angular app to handle that complexity - but only for that page. A 4 line helper loads the angular files automatically. Otherwise, it's all Rails. I've found this approach to be very flexible - it's able of delivering a very rich UI where needed without overcomplicating the good stuff that Rails provides for free. Even if I were starting over today, I think Rails would be at or near the top of my list. I feel for folks picking it up now, though, as it is a little tougher than it used to be.
  - bphogan 11y ago
    I agree with this so much. Would you be willing to share some examples of how you leverage Angular with Rails? I'd really like to see something that does this that isn't a toy. I'll even sign an NDA. I just would like to learn.
lkrubner 11y ago
It's fascinating to watch the changing reception of a given framework. I think this says a lot about how software projects grow old. Since my career is only slightly older than Rails, it's been the framework that I've got to watch the most completely. I recall in 2005 and 2006 there was an intense joy in the tech industry, relating to Rails, and it seemed like Rails was going to sweep the industry. In retrospect, that joy was mostly because Rails offered something simpler than the heavyweight Java frameworks that had dominated the era before. In 2006 there was the big question, "Is it Rails we love, or the ideas in Rails?" That is, did we all need to start using Ruby, or could we copy these ideas in whatever language we preferred? And nowadays we know the answer to that question. In 2005 and 2006 Rails had a huge impact on the industry, but by now its good ideas have been fully absorbed by other tech communities. For those who want to remember the mood of the times, circa 2005, Bruce Eckel did a great job of capturing it in his December 2005 essay "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts": http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 He was lamenting/celebrating the sudden end of the hype around Java.
michas 11y ago
May be a lame question but why are Rails versions 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 co-existing? Project lead couldn't decide on numbering scheme?

79 points by mlitwiniuk 11y ago

buren 11y ago

I really like that the Rails team is pretty good at doing regular releases. One noticeable thing though is that ActiveRecord, almost, always has more fixes than the other Action* gems combined, understandable since its the most complicated piece, but I can't help to think of Ernie Millers ActiveRecord talk a few years back. https://youtu.be/yuh9COzp5voA https://youtu.be/yuh9COzp5voA (A few of the things that he talks about are since then fixed..)

stevepike 11y ago
Wow, this is a really great talk for anyone using rails. Ernie Miller manages to dissect a few gnarly parts of ActiveRecord while keeping it positive and constructive.

gshakir 11y ago

Is Rails relevant today in the world of rich front end frameworks other than for legacy applications? I used to be a big fan of Rails but there is a steep learning curve and looks like there are better alternatives now.

aeze 11y ago
Sure it's still a relevant option. You can integrate the current popular frontend frameworks easily if you want. It provides a relatively painless and speedy development experience.
jherdman 11y ago
Absolutely! We're using Rails at Precision Nutrition. We use it to serve up a JSON API, and in a more traditional sense with ERb templates. We're finding it to be incredibly productive, and more than performant for our needs — especially when you couple it with Postgresql.
dham 11y ago
Yes
- gshakir 11y ago
  Thank you, so Rails would be a front runner choice for you when developing a new web application?
  - dham 11y ago
    Rails continues to include things that most developers need when building a web application or api. While most people are arguing about web framework speeds Rails has been putting in features that are useful, like mail previews, strong params, async emailing, Russian doll fragment caching(nice if your still doing traditional templates, can be used with JSON rendering too). The community also has very nice and mature libraries for doing authentication, authorization, audit trail, and uploading. Not to mention, testing is in out of the box.
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    It depends. But yes, Rails is certainly "still relevant".
  - aikah 11y ago
    Use the right tool for the job. If your project is just a REST api then Rails might not be the right choice. If you're writing a complex CMS/CRM,ecommerce site,or anything that has a complex UI from scratch, then rails and ruby's gigantic ecosystem will set you up and running in no time. But so can Spring,Django or Symfony if you know them from the inside out.
danso 11y ago
> and looks like there are better alternatives now. ...such as? It'd help to know what you consider to be "better alternatives" because it gives scope to what your priorities are. I've seen discussions in which people say, "Well now there's Sinatra"...which is fine, but that's more of an opinion about "Lightweight projects and systems are nicer" rather than "Sinatra is better than Rails". I used to use Rails all the time but now I do most data projects in Middleman...but that's because I prioritize static builds and front-end engineering and most importantly, simplified my data infrastructure so that it can be represented as a spreadsheet or plaintext YAML...but that's not something applicable to all projects. One of the most valuable parts of Rails is its opinionated infrastructure...and I think that's helped it be a little more nimble from version to version.
- gshakir 11y ago
  Better alternatives could be one of NodeJS frameworks, Play in Scala and Dropwizard for Java. They could be better in the sense, that I can share a JS library between the API and Frontend or I can share a JVM library between the API/Infrastructure layer.
  - ch4s3 11y ago
    So I've been using Rails in production for a few years now, and its pretty good. I'm sure there are better options for a number of specific domains. I also use Dropwizard(because I need to use a few java only libraries) and dropwizard is in no way better than rails, except in the number of requests per second it can handle. It is a pain to set up compared to rails, the docs are terrible, it forces you to use maven and they refuse to help you with gradle. There are very few Stack Overflow answers, and thats a problem, because Dropwizard offers few sensible defaults, its configuration all the way down. And generally, the lack of livereload makes web development a pain in java. Can't speak to Play though.
    - vorg 11y ago
      > Dropwizard [...] forces you to use maven and they refuse to help you with gradle The configuration syntax (YAML) shown in https://dropwizard.github.io/dropwizard/manual/configuration.html https://dropwizard.github.io/dropwizard/manual/configuration... looks quite nice. It says there you can use JSON instead. The syntax Gradle uses (i.e. Groovy) has a lot of cruft, including even a full programming language, which can be misused in build config files so best steer clear.
jbhatab 11y ago
No question, yes. I use quite a rich front end frameworks, but rails still shines for lots of use cases.
kentt 11y ago
Is there a steep learning curve? Admittedly, I haven't had to pick up too many new frameworks, but I would have thought Rails was easier to pick up than many others.
- lolhackernews 11y ago
  It's not easy at all. I mean, if you are filling in the generated scaffolds, it may be easy. But when your coworkers start using all the nasty routing DSL tricks and the myriad of helpers, it stops being easy. Thing is, it's too big and rich for its own good, and let's not speak of the development practices it encourages.
- lettergram 11y ago
  I just started learning it this week and it isn't bad... However, there's quite a bit of setup, and it's a bit tricky at first. Basically, a few years ago I thought it was easier to build my own framework in Golang, C, C++. I've also used PHP, Node and Flask from time to time. After doing all that, I had a pretty good understanding in how it all works, and can see the beauty in some of the way Rails works. I definitely think it'll keep growing and is worth learning if you're into web development.
- gshakir 11y ago
  That is the problem with rails. It starts off easy when you are just making CRUDs and as the code grows bigger, you have to know a lot on how the framework works and that's where the learning curve hits you.
- bphogan 11y ago
  It's easy if you stick with vanilla Rails. Where it gets complicated is if your team decides to use a different view language, a decorator gem, a factory framework, and a different testing framework. The more deviations from Rails proper, the higher the learning curve gets. If a person know Git, HTML, JavaScript, and one server-side language, I can teach them enough Rails to build production apps in a few weeks. I've had a lot of success with that.
- aikah 11y ago
  > there is a steep learning curve citing the parent no that's bullshit, just do the rails tutorial online and you'll be good to go. OF course you need to know Ruby. Like with any other language, you can't just learn the framework.
dfischer 11y ago
Rich front-end frameworks handles exactly that, the front-end. Rails is still an excellent choice for the back-end and serving up those APIs to those "rich front end frameworks."
damoncali 11y ago
I've been using Rails since 1.1 or so. It was the first framework I picked up, and the learning curve was steep for me (I didn't even know what a GET was at the time). It is much more involved now. Before there was no bundler, no asset pipeline or compiled assets of any kind. Javascript was an afterthought. There were no real choices to make. Railscasts was active. This was huge. Repeating for emphasis. Railscasts was huge for me. There were a few headscratchers along the way - RJS, components, maybe a few other oddities (I think turbolinks falls into this category), but they tend to get removed as time goes on if they don't work for a lot of people. The Rails team may get pretty enthusiastic about some weird stuff now and then, but they're also pretty good about reversing their mistakes. They seemed to have learned from the 2->3 transition hell as well. Upgrades are fairly painless now. That said, it's still very much relevant. It's been polished to the point where you can really do a lot with very little work. There are solid, well maintained gems that do lots of common tasks (although there are a few things that are strangely missing from the community). The REST convention is very powerful, and the code is easy to follow. I resisted the move towards complex js front end frameworks because I was tired of figuring out which one to learn. That hasn't changed. I abhor the pace of js framework development - I can't justify learning a lot of it from a business perspective. It is just too unstable. I have clients using Rails apps I wrote 7 years ago that are still very maintainable, and that is great. When I need complex UI's I take a hybrid approach and have rails load miniature angular apps on a page by page basis. If the view is complex enough, I have it load up a single file angular app to handle that complexity - but only for that page. A 4 line helper loads the angular files automatically. Otherwise, it's all Rails. I've found this approach to be very flexible - it's able of delivering a very rich UI where needed without overcomplicating the good stuff that Rails provides for free. Even if I were starting over today, I think Rails would be at or near the top of my list. I feel for folks picking it up now, though, as it is a little tougher than it used to be.
- bphogan 11y ago
  I agree with this so much. Would you be willing to share some examples of how you leverage Angular with Rails? I'd really like to see something that does this that isn't a toy. I'll even sign an NDA. I just would like to learn.

lkrubner 11y ago

It's fascinating to watch the changing reception of a given framework. I think this says a lot about how software projects grow old. Since my career is only slightly older than Rails, it's been the framework that I've got to watch the most completely. I recall in 2005 and 2006 there was an intense joy in the tech industry, relating to Rails, and it seemed like Rails was going to sweep the industry. In retrospect, that joy was mostly because Rails offered something simpler than the heavyweight Java frameworks that had dominated the era before. In 2006 there was the big question, "Is it Rails we love, or the ideas in Rails?" That is, did we all need to start using Ruby, or could we copy these ideas in whatever language we preferred? And nowadays we know the answer to that question. In 2005 and 2006 Rails had a huge impact on the industry, but by now its good ideas have been fully absorbed by other tech communities. For those who want to remember the mood of the times, circa 2005, Bruce Eckel did a great job of capturing it in his December 2005 essay "The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts": http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 He was lamenting/celebrating the sudden end of the hype around Java.

michas 11y ago

May be a lame question but why are Rails versions 4.2.3 and 4.1.12 co-existing? Project lead couldn't decide on numbering scheme?