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Comment by upmostly | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely love Rails. I'll always remember back in 2010 catching the train to Waterloo station in London and seeing a huge sign overlooking the train tracks that read something like "We Need Rails Developers".

Rails was such a huge part of my professional career.

Now, 13 years later and I'm deep in the JavaScript ecosystem and have been for 8 years.

The most exciting thing to come out of this ecosystem recently is RedwoodJS, because it takes a lot of inspiration from Rails.

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Similar backstory. Back when I used Rails as a young dev I remember loving it but thought it all felt a bit parochial somehow, like they didn’t really get where the web was going. Now I realise they were just not interested in hype and other bullshit, they never get sucked into the latest scalability trends like I always did, they never cared about being first and trendy, and that’s why Rails is still there and still effective. My theory is most other frameworks are unwittingly designed around avoidance - people trying to solve painful things “once and for all” so they don’t ever have to worry about them again, while Rails is more about embracing the uncertainty of the future and being smart and measured about it, like: “Yeah you might need to rethink this part of your setup in a few years to scale it, but there’ll be ways and it’ll be fun; don’t stress about it now, focus on what matters.” And as a more mature engineer I now realise they were so very right with this attitude, and that it results in much better stability and adaptability to new requirements over time. To think, the way I used to think it was a bad reflection on the ecosystem to see popular gems that haven’t been updated for months, while it was a good sign that Node packages were being updated every day… Lol. I think I need to make the jump back to being a Rails dev.

Yea it's funny how it worked out. I felt similar. I was chasing the latest trends, frontend frameworks, databases. They weren't, and now we're back where we started with sending data from the server and submitting forms.

I'm less likely in my career to stray away from whatever the old heads came up with. For instance the new thing is putting server/database calls in server side React components. But something tells me MVC was invented for a reason by people way smarter than me.

I started my professional career with Rails 8 years ago and deeply miss aspects of it. It uses lines of code so efficiently, letting you go from zero to product with outrageous speed. Everything is a solved problem. Ruby as a language is so expressive, so beautifully ergonomic, so easy to read. It's such a joy.

But the view layer has not aged well. After years of working with a focus on React and TypeScript, I can't stomach the Rails approach to views. As much as I appreciate the value proposition of Stimulus and truly feel the shortcomings of SPAs deep in my bones, I crave components, type safety, unidirectional data flow, and more options for styling than just classes. React in particular has rich options for UI frameworks that feel truly idiomatic. The last time I tried to start a project with Rails, I moved at a breakneck pace until I got to the view layer, at which point I had to pull the plug.

I'm reaching for Next.js these days because it's the closest I can get. It gives me the opinionated framework I crave plus server rendering and the ability to drop down into client-side rendering when it calls for it. Prisma is a damn good ORM, even if it doesn't have the intuitively ergonomic beauty of ActiveRecord. And of course, TypeScript throughout is a godsend.

But I still miss Rails. I miss the console, Sidekiq, the profound power of ActiveRecord for simple things with the ease of dropping back into SQL when I need it, the polish of FactoryBot and those easy easy easy tests. I miss the breezy and fluid syntax of Ruby. I don't feel limited by TypeScript, I love working with it, but TypeScript lets me lecture, Ruby lets me sing.

> But the view layer has not aged well.

Agreed - In my opinion, Rails messaging/soft marketing could be a lot better about how it's great for a data driven backend, whatever the frontend/UI.

I know there's things like API mode and webpacker, but this all seems very secondary and begrudging at times. Maybe I listen too much to what DHH says, but definitely think the Rails view stuff should be what's secondary. It's a turnoff for a lot of devs who would otherwise be quite happy with Rails as a backend.

I dunno, I think that there are a lot of products and developers who need the view to be as important as the backend, and it would be a shame for Rails to stop trying to woo them. Rails is making a big push for Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/) and on paper, it certainly looks like a very Rails-y way of doing views. Elixir users seem obsessed with LiveView and this seems cut from the same cloth, so maybe it’s the answer? But for it to be compelling for folks like me, it needs to be a bit more React-y: components with well-defined, type-safe interfaces, unidirectional data flow.

I never learned RoR, it’s had been perpetually number 3 on my “to learn” list for over a decade. However I loved CodeIgniter and also crave that all in one-ness so find myself going to NextJS time and time again now for that reason.

I pair Next with Nest (sigh, why only one letter different?) when I need a proper backend but I can get so far with Next that I’m using it less and less now.

ViewComponent, from Github makes writing views much better, but it's far from perfect.

Never seen this before, it looks great! I wonder how well it handles Sorbet or RBS types.

Any experience with it? What makes it far from perfect?

Have you use the whole Hotwire suite? It's much better than just Stimulus. Componentizing your views will also make it more modern.

I have not, no. When you say “componentizing”, what does that entail? Is it the ViewComponents gem?

If someone reading this has experience with both TS+React and modern Hotwire apps, you’d do the world a service by writing a blog about modern Rails views for the experienced React developer.

Yeah what I'm suggesting is a React-y modular view codebase. You can use ViewComponents but I quickly found it was too limited for me and I didn't like to have many files for a single component. I just use Rails partials, the performance hit for my app is none. I also wrote a local VSCode plugin for snippets autocomplete so I can go faster.

Also sprinkle some (rare) Stimulus and Turbo streams/frames.

The one thing you're gonna be missing is typing, Sorbet does not work in views.

Have a look at AdonisJS.

It's in a somewhat weird spot: On the one hand it is mature and has amazing DX/UX going for it, with a lot of very thoughtful tooling. On the other, for some reason, it has always remained niche with just a couple of core developers, even though it's now nearing version 6 and at least 8 years of releases. I do not know why that is the case. It's a beautifully written full stack framework, taking having inspiration from both Rails and Laravel and in the world of web TS, it should get a lot more attention than it does.

Maybe it's just the weird name :^)

I used AdonisJS. Reminds me a lot of rails but with the added safety of typescript.

Totally agree! I have used many frameworks (even written my own) but nothing gets close to Laravel for PHP and AdonisJS for TypeScript in terms of features out of the box and DX.

Adonis is inspired from Laravel but it’s far from being comparable. Features, community, “battle proveness”, third party packages, etc are just not there yet.

I was looking at Adonis and was shocked at how much it reminded me of Laravel and Rails. The creator definitely had a ton of experience in one or both.

I think it’s main problem is the lack of community. There are almost no third party packages and the core team is pretty small (one or two devs). I wouldn’t risk using it to find myself 5 years down the line using a zombie project I couldn’t move away from.

One thing is picking a library which I can replace if it it gets abandoned, etc. a very different one is picking a full stack framework where replacing it means rewriting everything.

If I wanted a full stack framework, I’d pick Laravel or Rails because they’re already proven, have a big community, are used by big names in the industry and I’m 99.9% sure they’ll still be around and maintained 5 years from now.

I partly agree.

Having a community is nice and motivating, but that makes building good software over that many years without ever being the community darling more impressive to me and seems like a great indicator for deep commitment, that gives me a different kind of confidence than hype and VC money.

I am not sure which sustains better in 2023.

I use AdonisJs at work. Having used Rails and Laravel before it was a very easy jump.

I've also wondered why AdonisJS didn't quite take off and grow a community while another single-developer-centric framework, Vue, did.

But of course Vue is a frontend framework, and maybe the appetite for those was higher (and associated risk was lower) than for a batteries-included JS backend framework like Adonis.

I was just talking about this topic of whether we really has any Rails-influenced JS frameworks out there in the wild. And I struggled to come up with anything off the top of my head other than Sails.js [1]. RedwoodJS looks interesting, what about it in particular do you find exciting?

[1] https://github.com/balderdashy/sails

Is that ad placement a genius piece of guerrilla marketing, or a recipe for total confusion, among the general population at least? Perhaps both.

Waterloo being the main station for commuters coming in from the south: genius marketing. Hitting both managers and developers.

I believe it must have worked well for them, although I have no specific proof, because that billboard was there for a good 6 months at least and must have cost a fair bit of money given how prominent it was.

I wonder why so many went this path. When I started with Ruby like 15 years ago it was just another language to learn, but in the end I just stuck with it.

I still build in Rails. And even thought I tried alternatives I don't think anything is as stable and fast (for me) to create things.

Rails is love

With the focus on server side rendering Nextjs 13 feels a lot more like Rails too. Other frameworks like Remix & Sveltekit seem to be heading this way too.

Ember.js is nicely adopted the bests from Ruby on Rails, and Ember.js is still one of the best JavaScript framework out there, IMHO.

Off topic question, Is it still very hard to make $200K in London as a web developer?

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