August 13th, 2024

I'm Back, Ruby on Rails

The author reassesses Ruby on Rails, praising its stability, built-in features, and supportive community, while highlighting its advantages for rapid development and deployment, making it suitable for startups.

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I'm Back, Ruby on Rails

The author reflects on their return to Ruby on Rails after initially expressing doubts about the framework. They acknowledge concerns regarding the framework's rejection of TypeScript but emphasize its strengths in web development, particularly for rapid iteration. Ruby on Rails is praised for its full-stack capabilities, built-in features, and stability, which reduce decision fatigue for developers. The author contrasts Ruby on Rails with other frameworks like Next.js and Django, highlighting the latter's frequent breaking changes and the need for commercial components. The supportive Ruby community is noted as a significant advantage, providing clear conventions that save time for developers. The simplicity of deployment with tools like Kamal is also mentioned, showcasing how Ruby on Rails allows for efficient product development without the complexities found in other stacks. Ultimately, the author concludes that Ruby on Rails remains an excellent choice for startups and small teams focused on delivering products quickly and effectively.

- The author has returned to Ruby on Rails after initially doubting its capabilities.

- Ruby on Rails is favored for its built-in features and stability, which facilitate rapid development.

- The Ruby community is seen as more supportive and less fragmented than those of other frameworks.

- Simplicity in deployment and avoiding commercial components are highlighted as key advantages of Ruby on Rails.

- The author believes Ruby on Rails is ideal for startups prioritizing quick product iteration.

Link Icon 4 comments
By @xtracto - 5 months
My company "inherited" some medium-sized Ruby on Rails codebase, and OMG what an abomination it is. Everything is "magic", everything is implicit and to find out what does what is horrible. I've done Ruby development in the past (production API with Sinatra) and it was OK, but I'll never start a "real life" project in Rails.
By @UweSchmidt - 5 months
When I learned about Rails a long time ago I thought the idea of MVC, scaffolding, creating the database, code and frontend that works, i.e. a basic application was genius, but hasn't quite caught on it seems.

Communities for RoR or Microsoft MVC could have created templates for all kinds of applications, and parameters with best-practice implementations of useful stuff like "jwt webtoken" could have been added and maybe implemented to work across different application templates?

Maybe there are good reasons why this is not feasible on a fundamental, technical level, but maybe that's just a path not travelled, as the open source spirit fizzled out and people tried for their own unicorn app.

By @bitwize - 5 months
Fast and unbreakable eh? Sounds like a job for Go without a framework.
By @pjd7 - 5 months
Where does one find out about all of these conventions for rails?