Comment by tekkk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tekkk | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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