Ruby on Rails is out: major coding bootcamp ditches it, due to waning interest
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I'm considerably less bearish on Rails than this article. My go-to stack, especially for prototyping and rapid product development, is a Rails API and a React Frontend or React Native mobile client. There's a gem for every common problem that I'm going to run into, and this setup "just works" for 90% of what I need to do, which is some flavor of CRUD mobile and web apps.
I feel like I've given Node an honest chance, and it definitely excels for real-time and high-performance apps, but for a basic web app, development feels slow and cumbersome.
Is there something that I'm missing about Node? This article mentions it being great for SPAs. What makes Node better for an SPA than a Rails or Django API-only app? And if there is something that makes it better, are there frameworks to make Node development for basic CRUD apps more productive? I tried Sails for a bit, but found it kind of lacking.
I don't think node comes out ahead in basic CRUD productivity as the rails ecosystem has many robust gems, established patterns, and documentation due to its maturity. They've recently added yarn and webpack integration as well so the core team seems well aware of the interest in SPA support.
It's a little tough to gauge though, since rails is a close to all inclusive framework while node's frameworks (ex: express) tend to favor smaller pieces you combine together yourself. There are pros and cons either way.
The cycle has completed. If there was anything that Ruby and RoR seemed like a salve to, it was Java (and perhaps C#/ASP) web frameworks.