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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I guess it depends on how active development is on your project. My feeling is Rails is only suitable for actively developed projects, if you are building a small project and then handing off to a client without a budget for maintenance than Rails is worse than probably anything else (except arguably Node) in terms of long-term stability. But if your project is actively developed the gem upgrade dance is not too bad.

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What are the alternatives?

- actively developed framework -> upgrade fun

- not actively developed framework -> security issues, trouble hiring devs, missing features, et cetera

- no framework, (also known as roll your own) -> much harder for new team to come up to speed on the code base

I contend that the first is the best of the bad choices.

I agree, if you're not capable of ongoing maintenance then you are doomed with all custom software. However I expect a PHP or Java framework to generally require less maintenance.

web2py is quite good. Still runs stuff from many years ago, almost no security issues, does a lot out of the box. Bit of a job to make it work with websockets I'll give you.

Seriously? Cause I had this small 'hand in' kind of project in my hands and saw it as a good opportunity to teach myself Rails. My daily job involves .NET development but that's not very exciting and learning something new was probably the most motivating thing when I accepted the offer. So your comment makes me feel kind of worried about my decision to go with Rails.

If you end up more than a version behind in Rails and your project is sizable, you're in for a special version of hell. Especially if you develop on Mac OS X, the dependency issues with things like libxml2 are especially painful.

See my reply to bryanlarsen... If there is no plan for skilled maintenance down the line then I always refer clients to hosted services like wordpress.com or squarespace. I used to do a lot of custom sites a decade ago with a mix of raw PHP, Drupal, Wordpress and Rails. Honestly it's all turned into a maintenance nightmare for people who didn't have "a guy" to call (I couldn't be this guy anymore after I joined my current startup). If you were determined to go down the custom route then I don't necessarily think Rails was wrong, but just that your client needs to understand up front that this will run for some amount of time and then inevitably need maintenance.

Yeah I'm in a similar situation as in I can be 'the guy' for now but eventually they'll need to find another developer to maintain the app. But what could have been a decent alternative for a webapp + db setup? I don't think wordpress is suitable for that kind of project.

Wordpress I consider to be the worst of the worst because A) it's a constant target of attacks and B) the hosted version at wordpress.com is much less headache (if you don't need heavy customizations).

The good news is that Rails is now mature, so the upgrade path tends to be easier than it was in the early days.

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