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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

While I prefer Django to Rails, I'm glad to see both teams taking support for real-time applications seriously.

Some will note that Node has had real-time for years, but with all due respect to the Node ecosystem, nothing in it (edit: I'm referring to server-side frameworks; I love Ember-CLI) is as nice for developer happiness and productivity as Django and Rails. The best practices that have taken years to be baked into these frameworks make it more difficult to bring in new functionality, but I feel more confident that when new features are implemented, they will be done right.

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As a designer that started programming in rails, that now uses front-end frameworks like Angular to build prototypes, I absolutely agree with you. JavaScript MVC experience vs. Rails/Django is night and day. I know it's not an apples to apples comparison, but JavaScript, npm, grunt, etc. etc. are all a real drag imo.

I have a feeling there are a lot of people looking at this from a similar angle.

I feel that we are in a very transitional time for web development right now. This is a field with a pretty high rate of change in general, but every now and then, things change dramatically even by web programming standards, and we go through a period of technological uncertainty. The last time I remember feeling this way was the rise of object relational mappers, dependency injection, model view controller frameworks, and various tag libraries on the front end[1] in javaland. I remember from a previous HN discussion that there is a web counter measuring the number of days since the last javascript framework was released. I remember feeling the same way about struts, struts2, spring MVC, tiles, tapestry, JPA, hibernate, ibatis, spring DI, pico, guice, and so forth…

Interestingly, much of this didn't so much get resolved as swept aside - Ruby and Rails, Django, and a few other technologies "appeared" [1, again] at this moment. I do remember feeling extremely grateful for ruby and rails, because I had started to hate programming. It wasn't the Java verbosity that I objected- I rather enjoyed programming with servlets/jsp and jdbc + the java web cookbook, and I never minded data structures and algorithms in Java - it was the churn and incredible amount of complexity just to do simple things that made me unhappy. Rails got some bloat here and there, expand and consolidate, but I feel that it did accomplish its main goal, at least for me, which was that I felt happy and productive programming again.

Now, with the disruption of SPAs, we are clearly back in framework churn, and I'm not loving the model of writing the back end in rails-api and using a javascript front end. I may warm up to this as my knowledge of javascript increases (and I certainly never minded going outside rails and writing sql, so I can't really say I object to more than one language). I've done a bit of ember, and it seems heavy to me, I have to duplicate so much routing, model, persistence, data tier work (I'm a noob, I may be doing it wrong, fully possible). I don't like looking at javascript as much as I like looking at ruby. I also do remember feeling a bit frustrated with Rails in the beginning, before I understood it well enough to do an end-run around conventions, so like I said, I may really warm up to javascript frameworks. But I really like Ruby, and I'm very satisfied with Rails (and if not rails, sinatra or something like that would be fine too).

Like I said earlier, I studied a lot of java-based MVC/DI/ORM approaches and ended up going with something that I hadn't even considered (Rails). I do think that in these highly transitional periods, this tends to happen - that you are surprised by the solution that ends up working for you. At this point, it's getting so speculative that I'm not highly confident in predicting things, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the "isometric" transpiled languages (like ruby and opal) end up changing things dramatically (ie., just as I didn't end up "picking" a java-based MVC/DI/ORM approach, I may not end up picking a javascript framework, I may end up surprised by a new and different approach).

[1] I understand these weren't really "new" ideas, many of them (like a lot of CS) go back to the 1970s, but they hit the scene in that they became an issue in day to day development for ordinarliy up-to-date but not cutting edge web developers, the people who just wanted to get things done.

  >  I've done a bit of ember, and it seems heavy to me,

One thing about Ember: it's specifically for "ambitious" applications. The idea is that you're going to be building something which needs all those things, so it's better to have them in the framework, where best practices can be shared across projects. Once you've built out those features yourself, you've built a custom framework anyway.

An interesting point about frameworks, generally: they have a constant overhead. So for smaller projects, the framework dominates the application, but as the application grows, the application will dominate the framework.

We're using Rails (in 'API-mode') with Ember. It's a great combination in my view. Thrilled to see Rails 5 providing even better support for this combination.

@steveklabnik Thanks for spearheading Rails-api! :)

Re: Ember being heavy; yes, it is a bit heavy but that has huge payoffs as your application grows.

Any time. It's been a few years, but it's finally in. Frankly, I had very little to do with it becoming eventually included, I believe that was Dan Gebhardt's work.

I should probably give some context for that statement. When I first learned Rails, it actually wasn't easy. People will probably be surprised to hear me say this, but Rails felt heavy! Seriously, compared to jdbc, servlets, and jsp, it felt heavy. I'd guess that people who were programming in PHP or perl/CGI probably felt it was "heavy" at first too. Of course, my code base was getting "heavy" too, since it was disorganized and mixed a lot that shouldn't be mixed. But if I wanted to do something, I didn't have to figure out the rails or spring way of doing it. I could go to the java web cookbook, or just write it up however I pleased. It feels a little weird calling jdbc "low level", but at the level of the task I was trying to perform (getting stuff into a database, programming logic on data, putting stuff back into a database, displaying stuff to a user), servlets and jdbc are actually kind of low level. You can do pretty much whatever you want, quick and dirty request-response, or build out your own MVC, ORM, and DI framework.

Now, on the other hand, compared to Struts or Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Spring DI, Rails felt lightweight. But if you compare someone else's MVC framework, like Rails, to a database connection and a programming language that can write out a server response, it's going to feel a little heavy, and you're going to feel a bit lost at first, no matter how good it is.

It took me a while to get used to Rails even though I consider Rails to have a friendly learning curve. So I do want to be clear that I don't necessarily consider Ember to be "heavy" in the context of what Ember seeks to accomplish.

To me, the real issue here is that if I'm going the rails-api route, I will have to use something non-ruby on the client. And then the question becomes why not just use javascript on the server, too, with node.js? Honestly, my initial study and experimenting with node and express have been positive, but I don't like the idea of giving up on ruby, or that all these wonderful server-side languages are obsolete now because for the moment, javascript rules the browser. Nothing wrong with node.js, at all, for those who like it but I have trouble believing that all web development, server side as well as client side, slowly migrates over to javascript, and that python and ruby become legacy languages because, well, why use anything other than javascript?

At this point, I'm just repeating myself, but I'll restate my very tenuously held belief that isomorphic, transpiled languages will play a big role in the resurgence of non-javascript languages for full stack development.

I can empathize :)

  >  And then the question becomes why not just use javascript
  >  on the server, too, with node.js?

I feel this from time to time. There are good things about it, but bad too. I mean, different languages have different strengths, and front and back end seem different, so it would make sense that a language designed for each case is going to maybe be stronger than a language that tries to straddle both.

It was really refreshing to read this response. Somehow it turned into "I prefer framework X over Rails because...." and Rails is lame because [fill in the reason here]. I've never even heard of Phoenix before this thread.

I guess Rails is stodgy and old. Technology changes very frequently sometimes too frequently. Less than 2 years ago everyone was getting on the Angular bandwagon. Now the conversation I've been having with employers is "Yeah we've decided that React is going in a better direction so we're replacing it with React."

Think about all that wasted code and time learning how to use the new framework so you can get what out of it? A few more miliseconds performance? Better more visually pleasing syntax? Learning the new hot thing? Does anyone ever think about the Return on Investment (ROI) relationship between learning something new, how hard it will be to learn that new technology and then figure out what you are gaining from using this new thing? Once you spend all that time trying to scale the steep learning curve for Angular or Ember or whatever new tech comes down the pike do you ever wonder "what did we gain by learning this new technology? was it worth the trouble learning it? What benefit did it provide once you know how to use it?"

I guess Rails is getting long in the tooth, but for the most part it does what I need it to do. It's predictable, it's readable, it's organized, and best of all I'm just competent enough to use it. I've hit the wall trying to learn it and overcome most of the pitfalls and aggravations while using it. It's just blowing my mind how eager many programmers are always pursuing the next technology. I'm all for change but only if the change is worth the aggravation. I don't know if Rails 5 is a big improvement but really it's good enough for most of what I need it for.

I love Rails. And in 2014 I wanted to build a very specific type of realtime app with Rails. I used Faye-websocket and Redis and got everything working with Puma.... and it fell flat on its face.

I learned enough Elixir and Phoenix to be dangerous and built the same thing there in about 2 days with much, much better performance. I've been working on it since.

I don't see myself moving away from Rails for most things I write because it's just more mature and suits my style of coding. I disagree with the way the developers of Ecto (the database adapter for Phoenix) are approaching things, so if I have a web to database app, it's Rails all the way. (Their decisions aren't bad. I just don't like them and that's my problem, not theirs.)

But if I have to do anything that deals with the realtime web, I can't think of anything better than Phoenix. I'll get over my issues with the DB layer and get stuff done because Phoenix channels are awesomel

This is a long winded way of saying "you should really look into Phoenix." :)

I have a Rails app running in production now where I used Faye for the websocket component. Faye is running in an isolated process (the nodejs version actually), and the Rails app POSTs to it through a Sidekiq worker.

Interestingly enough, that's not too dissimilar to the ActionCable model despite using slightly different techs.

Long story short, I had no issues with this set up and it's been running for around a year. I'm not at roflcopter scale, but it churns out about 100k events per month through Rails->Sidekiq->Faye without breaking a sweat.

That sounds really complicated to me. Lots of moving parts to maintain. What is Sidekiq doing for you?

It's simple to me because Rails doesn't know or care about the websocket server, it just understands that it needs to POST data to an end point with certain data. I can have 1 or 100 Rails instances posting to the single Faye server.

The Faye server doesn't know or care about Rails. It just needs to do its job of broadcasting the event to subscribers.

Sidekiq is there for me to easily monitor the events processed, and in theory the Rails app may not be in the same private network as the Faye server, so I decided to make the POST requests happen in Sidekiq. It seems like a good spot for that, since it's a "send it and move on with life".

The Faye server pretty much runs itself, it's been going for months and months without maintenance. Sidekiq gets updated once in a while because I'm using it for other things too and sometimes the app code for it changes, not a big deal tho.

I haven't even had the chance to learn Node and Meteor. The list of stuff I want to learn grows by the week. So many things to learn. Too many things!

Phoenix will have to wait.

> I don't like looking at javascript as much as I like looking at ruby.

If I could choose, I would take Ruby or Python over plain JS. But CoffeeScript makes the best parts of JS shine (an object is a hash/map) while making it far more beautiful by disposing of semicolons and unnecessary braces and parentheses. Indentation and arrow functions really make it a beautiful language. If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to try Ember with CoffeeScript (and Emblem and indented Sass).

I don't want to start a rails vs Django conversation, but why do you prefer Django over rails? I'm a rails dev and am just curious where Django is at with things.

A little bit of background: I learned Django first. Then I learned Rails via Code School, and flirted with building my app with Rails instead of Django. I saw the asset pipeline specifically as a Rails advantage over Django (I write Emblem, indented Sass, and CoffeeScript whenever I can avoid HTML/Handlebars, CSS, and JS). Also, building JSON APIs with Rails has better out-of-the-box support than it does in Django.

I always felt Rails' model layer is clunky compared to Django's. What is the definitive representation of my model? The validations in SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base or what's automatically generated in schema.rb when I run migrations via Rake? In Django everything, including migrations (in simple cases), is derived from the classes in models.py. But I thought it would be worth it to persevere, due to the above-mentioned advantages.

Then I realized I could (and should) compile assets via Ember-CLI, and Django Rest Framework is just a pip install away. So the two main advantages of Rails disappeared, and switching back to Django became, for me, a no-brainer.

Edit: I also prefer Django's less magical approach. This may seem ironic given my love of Ember, but Ember's magic is easier for me to understand than that of Rails.

Personal opinion, obviously, but I also find Rails to be way too magical sometimes.

I am also a Rails dev, but one feature I think Django really got right that is head and shoulders above Rails are Form Objects (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/forms/). Rails' attr_accessible stuff and even strong_parameters really pales in comparison.

I do rendering on the client-side, so do not use Django's Forms. But there are ModelForms which integrate seamlessly with your model because it is the definitive representation of a real-world object.

Similarly, Django Rest Framework has ModelSerializers and ModelViewSets which give you a lot of free functionality out-of-the-box precisely because Django's Model layer was designed with DRY in mind.

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