Has anyone here extensively worked with Rails and then gone on to work heavily with Node/Express, or vice versa? Would love to hear your overall experience and thoughts between the two.
I honestly am baffled as to why anyone would not choose rails for most web apps, let alone basic CRUD apps. Maybe Django would be an alright substitute, I just dislike Python as a language/ecosystem. And the Rails core and gem ecosystem is just so mature at this point, any new feature you need is just a gem install away (hyperbole a bit).
In the end, it's not a huge deal which stack you go with and great, successful companies have been built on all of these and even weirder stacks. Just wish the world settled on one so we could double down on the tooling around it :)
Also recognize starting a project with what language/tools you know best is often more important than picking the most optimal one for the job.
Maybe it's the insane memory requirements of Rails leading ot large AWS bills. It can be worse than running a JVM for a fraction of the performance. Rails didn't go out of fashion for nothing.
The difference is.. Oh my!
Rails makes developing so much easier and faster. Maybe I'm dumb, but I'm so much more comfortable with batteries included and developing products the idiomatic way.
With Node, I felt like I was reinventing the wheel for every feature I wanted to add.
I just looked at the page for Express, and the sticking point is in the title: "unopinionated." I WANT a HEAVILY opinionated stack. I LOVE that I can write 1 line of code in 3 specific places in the Rails directory tree to accomplish something that would take me literally 300 lines of raw Java and Typescript in an Angular world. Some people hate it; that's their prerogative. But this is the difference between Rails and so many other stacks: opinionation.
Yes, it takes time to learn where to put stuff. If that irks you, I'd recommend staying away from Rails. The opinionation is what allows me to leverage the stack to be as productive as whole teams of people banging away on Java.
I agree rails is better in every other aspect.