Hacker News Reader

Comment by juliendc | Hacker News Reader

I've a bunch of small Rails apps running on Heroku and I've to say that I'm impressed by the relevance of the new features in the latest Rails releases. Action Text, Active Storage and Action Cable are solving common and painful issues in any web app.

I've recently built a web app with Node and the time we spent solving problems which have already been solved a thousand times is astonishing. Things like picking an ORM, having a proper database migration system, running a test suite. It's actually quite depressing when you come from Rails where everything is working coherently out of the box.

The fact that there is no standards in the Node ecosystem make it a bit more painful. You have to carefully choose between many different libraries to solve your problem. Some of them are in TypeScript, other still use callbacks, etc. We basically had to glue together many libraries to get something working. All those hours could have been spent building the actual product and delivering value to our customers.

Hope they will ship many more releases!

View on HN

I've been trying to use NodeJS after using Rails for years and it's just such a terrible experience. I don't want to install every basic package by hand and generate every model and view and controller by hand. This is basic boilerplate nonsense that made Rails so popular 15 years ago, and NodeJS throws away every lesson we learned from Rails.

React is okay as a front-end but without a full stack framework, the current state of Javascript is like stepping back into 20 year old PHP development, where everyone just hacks together anything they can find with no structure, no convention, and no security.

I can totally relate on this.

In the end I think Rails and Node have different purposes. I would still use Node for proxy-style servers. Something with a small and focused scope which has to scale.

For business intensive apps with a large scope, Rails-like frameworks are still way more productive and robust even if they are less trendy for the moment.

The current frontend state is another story indeed. Frameworks like Ember tried to bring the same Rails-like structure to the frontend world but it isn't as popular and trendy as React for whatever reason. I think it's very costly for frontend teams to reinvent a coherent structure, convention etc for every new project. At least React has brought the same way of thinking in the frontend industry.

Rails scales OK. You can't run Netflix on Rails on a single server, but it scales OK.

I doubt that you can run Netflix on any single server no matter of the webframework. Besides that Netflix itself is a Rails user for many applications (most of them for internal purposes).

It seems the bottleneck with netflix would be storage requirements and number of PCIe lanes for extra NICs. I really don't see how, "This framework couldn't run a site that accounts for up to 40% of internet traffic at peak hours on one server; clearly it's terrible!" I like scaling as much as the next guy, but Pareto dictates (as does experice) that most stuff is simple business logic with an interface.

GitHub is the #65 most visited website in the world. Is that "webscale" enough for you?

I'm new to the Rails ecosystem but from what I've seen and also with many years using Django (which is very similar), I would agree with your assessment regarding Rails. The complex monolith that speeds up development very much has its place, especially at the beginning of a project. You can always cut it apart later as needed.

Regarding Node.js, however, I would say the pain is not worth it. For the same purpose I would now reach for Go (for networking stuff) or Rust (for high performance). This is after several years in a Node shop.

What about Elixir? Dynamically typed like Node and functional.

Not a very easy sell to management, unfortunately. I'm using it for a personal project though, mainly thanks to Phoenix.

It’s exactly what I find so great about Ember (beyond just preferring a true templating language for front ends)

React bringing the “same way of thinking” in the front end industry may be true now, but it definitely was not the case for many years. I saw three or four react projects and they were architected very differently, with different routing, different state patterns, different approaches to updating backend state, different build systems, etc.

That's because React is a UI library, not a monolithic batteries-included framework. Amazing to me how often this is misunderstood. React's relatively narrow focus is one of its strengths.

I think this is also a weakness as mentioned in the previous comment. React is dead simple and has a limited scope... but now what happens when I went to pull in external data, use react as a router, or manage complex data? Well, now authors have to decide which libraries to use in conjunction React, which can vary wildly from project to project. This is something that Rails and Ember has tried to avoid.

Agreed; of course there are tradeoffs! "What happens.." is that you can use Mobx instead of redux bc it's easier to reason about. You can have some preferred way of doing things, and let React be a component-level implementation detail. Pros and cons abound in choosing a bells-and-whistles, batteries-included framework vs taking on the overhead -- and upside -- of composing a set of preferred libraries or tools. I never said "React is always a better choice than X." I said "it's not apples:apples to compare them directly". For which I got downvoted? sigh

I didn't downvote you! I still don't have that ability yet ;).

No worries! I didn't mean to imply you'd downvoted me. :)

meta: I won't mind _this_ comment being downvoted since we're so far afield from the OP, but it's worth it to me to clarify intent in responding to a friendly peer.

Definitely agree with this. I have been switching from developing in ruby into Node 2 years ago as I thought this was "the new thing" for web apps. Now I just want to move away from Node. Large scale Node applications looks like 20 years ago, copy and paste all over the place, cheap libraries, no developer happiness, you have to reinvent the wheels, etc.

Why did Node become so popular if this is the case?

"WebScale"

and

a generation of programmers that grew up on Javascript thinking it would be cool to write JS on the server too.

Laziness I think. People wanted to use the same language for the backend as the frontend rather than picking their tools based on what does the job the best.

Agreed that picking the right tool for the job is essential. But you might want to revisit your assumptions about the benefits of baking in such a hard separation of "frontend" and "backend". See Gatsby for example.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion but I personally think a hard separation is required because the frontend and backend development solve different problems. Sure they're related but it's like the distinction between SQL and backend web service code. Sure there are tools like ORMs however they never compare well to well written SQL from engineers who understand databases. Likewise understanding the distinction of requirements on the frontend vs backend is just as important.

It's funny because many frontend web developers are keen to point out the distinction between Javascript, HTML and CSS and the importance of why HTML and CSS are distinctly different mark ups. Yet will then discuss frontend and backend code as if it's the same beast.

Maybe this opinion is an age related thing though. I've been publishing websites since the 1990s ('93 I think my first site went live). So I've always seen frontend and backend as separate entities - as they were for most of the web's evolution.

I think you misunderstood me, or we're talking past each other a bit here; I've been at it professionally since about 1998, so any difference in perspective is unlikely to be age-related -- at least in the sense of depth of experience with the tradition.

"The right tool for the job", yes, of course -- but why would you insist that a particular set of traditional architectural constraints must needs be permanently enforced at the level of language and runtime? Being locked into a "3-tier architecture, server-side" perspective is a common trap for many senior developers. As is dismissing the real (and amazing) progress and expansion of possibilities inherent in the accelerating changes in front-end technology. Of course there are ignorant juniors. Of course the signal:noise ratio in the world of modern web and mobile dev is suboptimal; there's so much churn and noise and froth. But also progress, evolution, improvement. To write it all off, clinging to comforting notions that what we mastered a decade or more ago is the best -- let alone only -- way to do it?

"The difficulty lies not in grasping the new ideas, but letting go of the old."

I don't disagree that Javascript has evolved into a first class language now but it hasn't always been. Your rhetoric - while lacking a lot of technical content - are valid for the current state of play but not the question being asked. Back in the early days of Node it was complete garbage but people stuck with it because they wanted a single language to rule them all and browsers wouldn't support anything beyond JS (despite how crappy JS was back then). So the reasons node gained any momentum in the early days was simply because:

1. it was too difficult to get any other language first class support for browser scripting (the reasons for that are obvious)

2. frontend developers wanted to reuse the same language for front and back (often because they simply didn't want to learn another language).

Let's also circle back to my point about the right tools for the job. Javascript has always made some sense for frontend development - it might not be the best designed language from an academic perspective but it suited browser scripting well enough to get the job done. Plus in the early days we didn't need anything particularly pretty anyway. But JS definitely did not suite backend development when Node was first being deployed. In fact I'm pretty sure Node was just a hobby project where some guys thought "Chrome's JS VM can run headless - lets see where this takes us." (this part may be incorrect but I have a vague recollection of that being the case). However without tools like Docker nor any decent way of running parallel execution stacks (nor a first class web server supporting Node ala mod_perl / mod_php / phpfpm / et al) it meant Javascript was simply not a good language for backend development for a relatively long time because the tooling wasn't there and the language lacked the primitives to compensate (like how Python, Perl and Ruby could all self host their own threaded web server).

These days Javascript still doesn't support threading but it does have other primitives that do a reasonable job of compensating. Plus with tools like Docker, you can always scale sideways when your application failed to scale upwards. The tooling around JS has improves, the language itself has improved and the way we host web sites has also evolved (eg cloud environments running containers vs VMs or even bare metal servers running web servers written in C++ which spawn language VMs as separate processes). The whole landscape of backend development had to change as well as Javascript itself before it really because a first class backend language.

So to summarise, yes you're right to and extent. But you answer a subtly different question: "why is node still popular?" rather than the question I was answering: "why did it become popular?"

Ironically it was the popularity that gave node the momentum to improve; rather than node initially being good that gave it popularity (though obviously node improving would have had a snowball effect on node's popularity as well).

Right on -- we're mostly in agreement.

Definitely a fair point about addressing the original question. IME, node _became_ popular in part because it allowed web developers to start solving problems themselves, directly, using a language they already knew [albeit a kind of terrible/problematic language at the time], to do things like CLI scripting for automation of tedious FE dev workflow tasks (a la Grunt and bower), or standing up dirt-simple web servers. At that point the floodgates had opened. With the concomitant (and ongoing) shift in architectures toward executing more and more of the application on the client side (with hugely popular services like gmail and google maps demonstrating the power of "Ajax"), the rest became almost inevitable. With Node, like Javascript in general, the quality followed the popularity, as world-class engineers set to fixing and improving what was available to work with, to shape it into something better-suited to the task. The process might even be ~akin to selective adaptation in biological evolution.

I like how you've phrased that. It's a lot better (and less opinionated) than what I put :)

It's very easy to build small things with (small API servers, proxies, tools for example), development of those things is quick, the development feedback cycle is extremely rapid, JS is a bit of a lingua franca (for better or for worse), it is extremely easy to get set up (again, for simple things). In turn this created a huge community, which in turn triggered a virtuous (?) circle, and gave easily-installable libraries for almost anything you can think of. It also should be said that it is good at what it does. The reactor pattern works well in specific use cases and is easy to understand -- which I guess is the main cause of it being used as a general purpose hammer. Yes, it has glaring issues, but the "silly JS programmers with their toy language wanted to write backend servers" meme is a bit annoying.

I believe for small projects it can be interesting, you can have an instance up using 50 MB ram. Also the language is widely used. JS is used in the frontend so they believe it's great for the backend also because you "reuse" the code. In my experience close no code is reused from frontend to the backend and vice versa.

Because there are an awful lot of JavaScript programmers out there, and Node let them apply the skills they already had on the server side for the first time [1].

[1] Technically, Node didn't invent server-side JavaScript; Netscape's application servers supported a version of the same idea in the '90s, back when Netscape was still a thing. But there was a long period where JS was effectively ghettoized as a language for browser scripting only, and Node is what broke it back out of that.

What you're describing is just bad code. That happens in any runetime. This is not specific to Node.

I agree, but from my observation bad code is more significantly more widespread in Node. The tooling is just incomplete by default, you have to setup yourself. Further the projects structure is completely different on every project (and typically not nicely done).

Have a look at Sails.js. While not perfect, its highly influenced by Rails

https://sailsjs.com/

What's the current state of Sails? I first heard about it 5 or 6 years ago but haven't heard much else about the project in ages.

I worked with node for 5 years and never came across anyone using sails. That might be a symptom of the node community but last I saw it still wasn’t very good.

I'm currently working with it for a project atm, I can not recommend it, it's ORM is pretty bad, cutting corners wherever possible, but the worst thing about it is its documentation it is badly redacted and relies a lot on examples rather than laying out the possibilities of what you can do with a certain part of sails, issues also go unattended for a long while and there's not much of a community surrounding it.

Just my two cents, I would be happy to hear some success stories from it though.

I worked with sails about three years ago. It was a decent experience, but Sails 1.0 has been years underway and seems like a major rewrite of the whole thing. I don't really think a great many people use Sails anymore, and I don't think I would recommend it either.

Sails is and has always been a subpar framework with a toxic community. The one time I tried to use it in production I regretted it big time.

You're comparing a runtime environment to a framework.

Use Angular on the client and something server side in Node and you're set.

Use Typescript and you'll be able to refactor easily too.

Nobody uses just React+Express w/o TS for something serious.

"Nobody uses just React+Express w/o TS for something serious." Hardly. Just search for "(react.js or reactjs) (nodejs or node.js)" on indeed.co.uk. 441 results. Now append "-typescript" to the same search. 378 results. It appears Typescript hasn't yet taken over the world.

Maybe I should have said "... and has a good time." :)

Most companies using typescript don’t advertise for typescript developers and will simply look for JS decelopers, because the belief is that anyone should be able to transition from JS to TS so why limit your scope.

Where's your evidence for this?

If you just use TS without really understanding how it can help you and your particular problems you're solving, it can be more of a burden to refactoring than a saviour. Type systems are not a panacea for refactoring difficulties.

How so? I wouldn't use it for a tiny app, but for something where you're thinking far into the future I would.

Keep in mind, at my current company we don't use it (giant 5 year old AngularJS codebase) but I would love to.

You don't even have to use it fully. Just mark your function arguments and you're already saving headaches.

I agree that TypeScript is great, but I've seen it used to establish its own kind of technical debt is what I'm trying to say. If you establish types for your poorly designed application it will only entrench bad design deeper. So, throwing a type system at that problem isn't actually helpful at all in cases like that.

I agree though that using TS and not worrying about actually defining types can be great. I do think you can run into sort of wandering inference bugs or cases where other peoples' types can be poorly defined, but that's a rare problem in my experience and well worth the benefits you get otherwise.

Anyway, I'm definitely not trashing TypeScript or suggesting no one should use it or anything. I almost always start new projects with it.

I think I get your point.

>You're comparing a runtime environment to a framework

Yup. Because there is no Rails-like framework in NodeJS.

>Use Angular on the client and something server side

That "something server side" is the entire problem. In 2006 if you're writing a web app, the answer was Ruby on Rails. In 2019 the answer is "Angular or React or Vue on the front end and something server side". No generators, no scaffolds, no auto-generated migrations, no opinions, no ORM, no standardized way of doing anything, no naming scheme, no guidance. Just "something server side".

If I said "use Ruby to create a web app" you'd load up Rails. If I said "use Python" you'd load up Django. If I said "use NodeJS", you'd just... list all your NPM packages?

Yeah, you're right. I don't know why that is. You can properly engineer stuff in Node but there are no "rails" to guide you so I get that more projects will be a mess as compared to Rails or Django.

To be honest I wouldn't suggest Node as a solution for your backend which is probably why I said "something server side" because when I think Node I just think of a thin API wrapper that uses an RPC to call your Java services or what-have-you. The only reason you even do that is to give the FE people something to mesh data together from services for their clients while you can keep backend APIs generic. Luckily graphql will start to replace that convention.

Makes me want to build such a framework in TS... but why would I do that when I can just use Spring. :)

Speaking of PHP, I'm really enjoying using Laravel as of late. I'm not super experienced in web development, but the Laravel experience is my favorite so far. The Laracasts tutorial series is also top-notch. I really wish other projects had official video tutorials like them.

Like others have mentioned, this is an apple vs orange comparison. Ruby & Rails is not the same as NodeJS. A popular framework which you probably used with NodeJS is Express, that as its documentation states tries to be a minimal framework for creating NodeJS servers. I agree that something like Rails has its own benefits, but I can't really take seriously this type of complaining when it's directed at the wrong thing. You're complaining about frameworks, not NodeJS the runtime. And NodeJS is not fixed to some specific framework that forces you to do things in one way. And thank god for that.

There was some initial burden I admit with NodeJS but I have at least got to the productive plateau (with TypeScript). Once you figure out the pattern that works for you, it gets simpler. The inventing part is what drives most developers crazy, and it did for me too. It's perhaps too non-restrictive but well, hopefully there's somebody in your company showing you the right way. And you don't want to install every basic package by hand? But have them already included? You understand that adds quite a bit of bloat to projects that have no need for eg CORS or body-parser. And "code hacked together" is only a problem with bad programmers, you can get working and secure code with NodeJS, it just needs thought put into it. And yes, Rails has advantage with this but I think you made that argument clear.

Instead of making the argument "NodeJS is bad" you should aim that at the frameworks of NodeJS. SailJS was a good attempt at Rails but it's way too restrictive with its patterns (and sadly the documentation is not good). Deno looks promising and I hope people will be building better frameworks on top of that.

I think the point is more that a Rails style framework does not exist in Node. There are a few projects that have attempted to be like Rails, but none that appear to have succeeded in any real way.

In the Ruby ecosystem, Rails will get you very far. In Python, Django will do the same. PHP –> Laravel. Scala –> Play.

JS does not have an equivalent, and the community seems to actively dislike the approach. That's fine, a monolithic framework approach isn't always the best option, but in the Node ecosystem it's not even an option on the table.

Well your argument is a lot more nuanced than the original comment I responded to. And I agree, it is burdensome especially for people not familiar with NodeJS that there isn't a one-size-fits-all framework. I don't really know the main causes why it happened, but I guess people felt satisfied with Express & Koa though it left, and still leaves, a lot for programmers to do by themselves.

Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say SailJS to make it work. Nevertheless my experience with ORMs or scaffold generators has been that I always feel they are one custom use case away from turning from time-savers to time-sinks. When you write your own SQL and implement your own models/services or whatever abstraction you decide to use, you get a much deeper understanding of what is going on than just trusting your framework to do it for you. And is that good or bad? That is certainly a topic for debate.

SailsJS killed itself. It was a flaming pile of garbage in terms of it's design with an ultra toxic community to boot.

> Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say...

This is interesting to me, because Ruby has Sinatra (and others) that compare well to Express/Koa. Python has Flask which is very popular, as well as a number of fantastic alternatives. These ecosystems have very mature, well designed, small web frameworks, but still people choose the larger frameworks in these ecosystems, and all of the frameworks get good maintenance.

I wonder if it's a cultural thing in the JS ecosystem. Maybe the ease of publishing a package creates a race to the bottom in terms of package scope, which makes it so difficult to sustain larger more all-encompassing packages.

I've worked with Ruby+Rails/Sinatra/Cuba, Python+Flask/Django/Bottle/Sanic, and Node+Express, and when I was in the Node ecosystem I sometimes really wanted that Rails/Django equivalent – not always, but the lack of it would cause me to avoid Node for large backend projects.

I am a big fan of Knex for just this reason. It's not an ORM, just a migration manager and query builder. It makes easy stuff easy, and for complex stuff it gets out of your way.

If you need complex relationship models, ObjectionJS sits on top and will auto-manage relationship tables and all that nasty stuff for you.

Yes I totally agree with you, it's not a fair comparaison.

My point was indeed that there is no real Rails equivalent in the Node ecosystem. Something mature which is supported by a large community over many years. Django, Spring Boot, Laravel, Phoenix play such a role in each of their language.

In Node you have to come with your own set of libraries, structure and convention, which is not the most efficient way to start and maintain a project. I agree that more senior programmers might avoid most of the common mistakes, but still you might spend time discussing little details such as structure and conventions. Frameworks such as Rails make at least some of those discussions irrelevant and allow you to quickly move on.

Well I just replied to a comment before you, but we are definitely on the same page here. It's a mess when you start your first NodeJS backend, especially if there's nobody to help you. You'll probably make some terrible mistakes in your design that have to be later refactored. It's a downside but hopefully things get better. Maybe Deno will give us a fresh start.

This totally misses the point which is that there is no equivalent option in the node ecosystem. Ruby would be some toy project for enthusiasts if Rails hadn't come along and given huge numbers of developers a compelling case to put it in production.

It's not clear to me why people make this choice with node when after you choose it you are left to solve solved problems from scratch. Chosing node is the explicit choice to enter an ecosystem that does not have good cohesive solutions to basic problems. To do things that could be done easily with a framework like rails the very hard way.

Express is not a framework. It's a library that just lets you set up routes, and a pretty minimal one at that. Calling express a framework would be like calling the routes.rb file in Rails a framework - it's not. It's a small part of a framework. NodeJS the runtime is great (although the number of deprecated functions in core is depressing). Node the ecosystem is a nightmare.

I'd echo the sentiments of the other developers here. Building a backend or full-stack app in Node is painful at every step of the journey. You're writing basically everything by hand, while using sub-standard orms and route handlers.

I've decided I like React enough to continue using it. But I'll be sticking to Rails for the backend.

> Deno looks promising and I hope people will be building better frameworks on top of that.

Deno is not a framework.

> building better frameworks on top of that

As in building frameworks on top of Deno, like Express/Koa/etc are built on top of Node; Node is not a framework either

You're right, it's not a fair comparison. Because there is no fair comparison. That's the entire point. There is no fair comparison between Ruby on Rails and anything in the NodeJS world because nothing like Rails exists in the NodeJS world.

That was the entire point.

This right here. This is my main beef with node. I love js and the ecosystem can be amazing, but just give me something that I can use to focus on the business problems.

I think it's better to compare Loopback/Express with Rails instead of NodeJS.

From what I've seen of Loopback's verbosity I think the best comparison would be with Spring. For some reason every time the corporates get their hands on a dynamically-typed language they try their best to turn it into Java/C#. Facebook did it with PHP and now Microsoft are at it with Javascript.

Completely differently origin stories.

nodejs is JavaScript bindings for libev. http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html

Other comments listed npm modules with Rails equivalents, so I won't repeat.

The one thing I got out of nodejs is becoming reacquainted with working closer to the metal. Minimalism for some HTTP endpoints (what the kids call REST) can be fun.

Rails, PHP, nodejs et al, J2EE, etc. I've got no dog in this fight. Each is uniquely terrible. I hate them all.

I basically agree, but there are some people fighting the good fight against Node's awful ecosystem.

- Parcel is like if Webpack were a build system and not a programming language to create a build system with. - Vue has good set of solutions. Nuxt is a nice version of "here's what you're probably going to want, already glued together." - If Deno ever becomes a thing, it will be cool.

It feels like maybe if we're lucky, in five years, there will be an ecosystem for modern JS that doesn't suck.

It's too bad that Node.JS is mostly used as a scaffolding and glue language for web frameworks, while where it really shines is as a replacement for a systems language. You sacrifice 4x performance to get better safety, less development time, easier code, easier deployment, and a more open and friendly ecosystem.

Replacement for a systems language? How are dynamically-typed callbacks, as in Node's fs library, in any way comparable with, say, go routines or good old procedural C++? Async is the worst programming model for building systems.

The Node.JS libraries also have Sync (not async) alternatives. But everything is async by default. JS/Node is single threaded, but supports multi process concurrency with message passing and sharing of sockets.

I personally prefer callback convention, but it's not the only paradigm. Primises/Futures, and async/await is also very popular.

Node.JS makes you think async, which has a learning curve, but I prefer that over multi threading locks and data races.

Go is also great. But I think JavaScript is much easier.

Hi how are? Why dont you give a try on kiwi serve. Its a framewrok I develop t work with node in a better way.

You can check here www.kiwi-server.com.

Of course It's open source

The main pain with Node, if you come from outside, is being able to know which modules are well supported, and will be for the years coming.

As an example, I spent quite a long time investigating ORM libraries for relational DBs, and the projects that were half dead were the majority.

Knex was suggested by everyone, but at that time the project leadership was changing so the future was uncertain. I settled on Sequelize, which had most of the functionality, but several points did not make sense:

- the documentation is hard to search

- I had to create a PR for sequelize-cli (separate module, that is not recommended for production!) to get the same functionality of `rails db:create`

- the syntax was changed to use Op instead of strings for security, in a minor version

- the way associations are defined is weird at best

- no support for ES6 in the cli, so all migrations are ES5

Etc.

And this is just for an API server. I looked into the frontend part and it was so much work.

I am still using Node for server processes when I have to, but I wouldn't recommend it over Rails. The way you can generate a simple app that does something useful, configure it and deploy it to Heroku in few hours is unchallenged.

> know which modules are well supported, and will be for the years coming

Doesn't matter if you're coming from outside or not, no one can predict the future.

For example winston was probably the most recommended logging library (14k stars) and was a good recommendation at one point. But then they decided to do a rewrite for v3 which introduced a ton of bugs and incompatibilities. I spent several days trying to get it to log in the old format and failed and ended up downgrading back to v2.

This is a recurring theme in the js ecosystem (another example is react-router which is just a huge piece of shit and no one should depend on it despite its 37k stars).

Any suggestions for an alternative to react-router?

Did you tried Router5( https://router5.js.org/ )

They have a react version. I experimented with it in one of the small projects i worked on. My experience was positive.

Most importantly, it's API is simple and easy to use.

My current favorite is Navi.

https://github.com/frontarm/navi

These replies to this question say it all for me. Routing should not be some library research task for the developer. How do I have time to review these packages and all of their million dependencies for security issues or just bad design.

No one does, they just throw it in production and hope whatever way they figure out how to get the thing they need done at that moment doesn't burn them later.

I would have said reach-router, as it seems fairly well thought through, is constrained, and was originally an attempt to correct deficiencies in react-router. But it's being merged into the next version of RR.

What anm89 says is on point. All solutions available are awful in their own special ways. If a router solution _is_ needed, and there's no chance you can't just rely on the browser history API, imo stick with RR despite it's major downsides, because at least there is the major benefit of vast community support; all solutions seem fairly shit otherwise (just cross your fingers you don't need to do any React Native work that needs a routing/navigation library cos hoo boy it's a shitshow)

Totally agree on the ecosystem being problem number one. A ton of modules that depend on a ton of other modules, poorly coded, not maintained, not tested.

Put on top the fact that NPM doesn't want to deal with version conflicts and installs 173 versions of the same package and you get a huge directory full of security warts.

I can kind of predict that Spring and Hibernate (Java) will be around the next 5 years.

The JS ecosystem is just immature.

I had this issue recently where I wanted to revive an old side project I worked on a few years ago. The front-end was written with React + Redux + Webpack, which I assumed I would still be able to get running today, but it ended up turning into dependency hell (even though there were version numbers in the package.json, npm doesn't lock to those versions?!?).

The backend was written in Go, and I just ran go build and it worked without problems. The fact that it just worked without me having to change anything shows how important backwards compatibility is to that community.

The past few weeks I've been working on a backend Typescript project, and the number of packages I've seen that don't use semver or any similar versioning system makes me cringe. I even saw one that wore this as a badge of honour in their README :s If you release a library and you don't have a sensible versioning system, you are just making life harder for your users. (I'd argue for a CHANGELOG too - the GitHub releases section doesn't count)

NPM added the automatic lock file feature only after Yarn came up with it. I remember using Rails before Bundler was created. Man I don't wanna go through that ever again. Never use a package manager that doesn't cache versions!

FYI, if you want a decent Postgres client, check out `slonik` [0]. It doesn't support migrations, but there are other tools for that [1].

[0] https://github.com/gajus/slonik

[1] https://github.com/mmkal/slonik-tools

Node's main problem is that the only real dominant framework is express, a Sinatra like framework. Other than that there's so many redundant libraries and frameworks, that it's hard not to suffer from the paradox of choice, which eats up a lot of time. It's a bit easier though if you limit yourself to using Typescript based frameworks; less choices.

Following are the alternatives :-

Action text in RoR <=> DraftJS (Isomorphic ReactJS plugin with server side rendering), Froala (compatible with most of SPA frameworks)

Active Record in RoR <=> SequelizeJS (ORM), Slonik(Non-ORM, my recommendation) in NodeJS

Action Cable in RoR <=> WS, Socket.io 2.0 (recommended)

DraftJS - https://github.com/facebook/draft-js

Froala - https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor

SequelizeJS - https://sequelize.org/master/

Slonik - https://github.com/gajus/slonik

WS - https://github.com/websockets/ws

Socket.io - https://socket.io/

Node.js is not equivalent of Rails. Rails is a framework, while Node.js is a runtime. Node.js is equivalent of MRI.

Everybody is aware of this. The point is why would you choose the node ecosystem for any complex task when it forces you to manually solve all of the things Rails does for free. It's insane for a project of any complexity except for very specialized cases.

Put another way, you're exactly right, it is apples to oranges, or a better analogy might be a Porsche to a Pontiac. Why would you ever choose the thing which is inferior in almost every way?

From the comments it does not look like necessary everyone is aware of this.

You should have a look at things like adonisjs.com to get a better comparison. I am not saying node-based tech is better or worse, but to dismiss all nodejs server side and say Rails is better at everything is not a healthy attitude, especially regarding the shaky history of the Ruby language itself (eg. The whole RubySpec thing).

And; how can node be inferior in every way when it isn't even the same kind of entity? It seems you are barking up the wrong tree.

It is a testament to how successful Rails is when it is hard to distinguish it from the programming language it runs on. Congrats to them.

There’a an architectural lesson to be learned/recalled here for “hardcore” developers.

I didn’t realize that Github ran mostly on Rails until this article and was kind of surprised given the scale of the site and Rails reputation for performance.

It’s a great reminder of architecture/design truism: if your site is not inherently performance bottlenecked, then you problably shouldn’t let language or framework performance be the sole deciding factor in choosing or whether to migrate to a platform. Unless we’re talking about >= order of magnitude difference, or a site whose user experience is being limited by performance. Perf and scalability are just one factor.

Pragmatism across many factors with perf/scale being one, and making yourself as blind as possible to technology religion, biases, personal investments, and digging beyond simplistic conventional wisdom (rails has perf issues), looks to remain a core ability for making arch decisions.

Experience can actually be a negative: I wouldn’t have a problem developing efficiently in node or coming up with an alternative to migrations for example.

But what I can or cannot ramp up on quickly the fastest is likely irrelevant and maybe detrimental when considering what’s best for a project as a whole.

Seeing comments here about productively gains from specific Rails features, and another comment saying they can’t imagine living without migrations as a built in feature, just seem like great reminders of how important it is to try and avoid making decisions relative to the experience or needs of only one or a few people.

It seems like good tech arch decisions need to consider DX issues enough to seem very similar to good UX decisions, the primary contrast being the users have very different stories and requirement scenarios.

As someone who did their first "serious" web development with Node, but has worked for the last year at a Rails shop, I still love Node for my personal projects, but much prefer Rails for anything that requires collaboration.

Ryan Dahl has a speech about his regrets with Node, and most of them center around the way code is managed.

IME, the sloppiness to how code is managed in Node, combined with the lack of conventions/dominant Rails-esque framework in the Javascript ecosystem, leads to codebases where no one is sure how or why something is set up the way it is.

As annoyed as I sometimes get with Rails' forced conventions or auto-magic abstractions, the beauty is that they are consistent. With a team full of experienced Rails engineers, you can pretty much guarantee that multiple people on your team can explain the "why" behind something quickly. This is a massive productivity save, especially when you're ramping up.

My two cents is the sweet spot for node is as an auxiliarily tool rather than a whole web app framework. For instance adding some realtime functionality to an existing app, as a server renderer for SPAs or some microservice glue. The community has resisted large rails-like frameworks from the beginning and I think it just shouldn't be used this way.

Well, I don't believe rich text editing and websockets are that common to be included in Rails by default. I can't find any excuse for not distributing those features as separate gems. It's not that hard to add "gem actiontext" to the Gemfile and run "bundle install" if you're one of that 1-2% who needs WYSIWYG.

I don't have any numbers to back it up but I believe you're wildly underestimating the number of Rails projects that need WYSIWYG editing. The state of WYSIWYG editors in Rails is so unacceptably poor that I'm glad they're bundling it out of the box. It's kind of like Microsoft making their own laptops, because every other Windows laptop of the time was undeniably junk.

Yeah, I am extremely excited about this - small sample size but I've worked on a handful of rails apps and I seem to always need a WYSIWYG editor and could never find one I really liked - glad to see it better incorporated!

> the state of WYSIWYG editors in Rails is so unacceptably poor

Rails is a web framework. Why does it have anything to do with a WYSIWYG editor on the frontend? There's a giant vast offering of WYSIWYG editors to choose from that POST data back to your web backend just like any other form. I don't want rails to have any opinion or "state" of WYSIWYG selection for my application.

I kinda feel like Rails had it's heyday around 3.2 or 4.0 and since then has been creating problems to solve instead of solving actual popular use cases.

You don't need to use action text if you want to go with an own solution. Action Text is so well integrated that inserting (and uploading) images via drag and drop works out of the box.

>I don't want rails to have any opinion

Man did you pick the wrong framework.

>There's a giant vast offering of WYSIWYG editors to choose from

As someone who has tried them all, I can definitively say this is not true. Trix/ActionText is the only one that works.

>Why does it have anything to do with a WYSIWYG editor on the frontend?

Because Rails is a full stack web framework. It includes its own front-end for tons of stuff. It's opinionated and wants people to do things The Rails Way.

> As someone who has tried them all, I can definitively say this is not true. Trix/ActionText is the only one that works.

That's an obviously false statement. There's like a dozen react based ones alone and at least as many vanilla JS ones all over the web. I've implemented several in Rails before with image upload support. Works no differently than any other web backend.

> Because Rails is a full stack web framework. It includes its own front-end for tons of stuff. It's opinionated and wants people to do things The Rails Way.

No, Rails explicitly does not have opinions on everything. It doesn't even come with built in authentication handling, which is a pretty major web framework component. I like that it has strong opinions about things like handling the HTTP request/response, configuration, code layout, ORM, etc but leaves a lot to the user to implement. In the past they've even culled features off into their own gem when they decided it wasn't relevant enough. A WYSIWYG text editor doesn't seem all that much like core functionality to me.

It looks like a decent WYSIWYG editor was one of the headline features of this 6.0 release. Its straight from Basecamp so you know its polished to the hilt.

https://trix-editor.org/

https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/action_text_overview.html

You can choose to skip them

  rails new app_name --skip-action-cable --skip-action-text etc...

Most of these libraries can be skipped, just type:

  rails new -h  see all the options

Edit: in case you decide later on that you need them you can install them as you described with `gem actiontext` etc...

Of all the Rails projects I've been working on in the the last 15 years (all of them) probably only two needed rich text editing. One of them is the only Rails project I'm working on now. We're not changing the editor (ckeditor) but I could start a new project with the new default. I wouldn't mind installing it as a separate gem.

You're right about Node, but I think it's a bit apples to oranges because they're suited to different use-cases. Rails is great for mostly static sites. Node is great for mostly dynamic sites. It's almost as simple as that.

Whilst Node and Rails certainly have different niches the distinction between static and dynamic sites is lost on me. Both are written in dynamically-typed languages and both produce HTTP responses dynamically. What's the basis of your Rails = static sites assertion?

I didn't literally mean static sites ️ By static I mean I site like Github, Craigslist, Wikipedia. Stuff doesn't change often. Uses forms for submitting data. By dynamic I mean sites that make heavy use of ajax, you want real-time anything, high levels of interactivity in the interface. These are often apps.

Rails has an --api option and most of the Rails roles offered by recruiters these days are a combination of Rails and React, Vue or Angular. Rails assets are served with webpack and there are options for React, Vue and Angular when creating a new Rails app.

Yes but Rails is still optimized for REST CRUD apps. It's great at those apps. I use it to develop those kinds of apps. But when you want something super reactive and customized and interactive and dynamic and real-time, I reach for Node.

If I wanted something super reactive, truly concurrent and real-time there are many better options than Node - Elixir, Golang and Clojure to name a few. I just don't get the Node hype - it's not the best tool for anything other than allowing JS devs to pass themselves off as back-end experts.

If the site is static you only requre html files. A server side language like Rails would only be used to create dynamic sites.

No that's not what I meant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com