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Comment by trilbyglens | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the things that sort of stopped rails from becoming mainstream was that when WebApps really took off everything switched to SPA apps. Now that's shifting back a bit (a good thing imo) as many people are starting to recognize the downsides of frontend apps. Next.js is basically one giant workaround for the shortcomings of spa apps.

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Rails isn't mainstream? I'm of the opposite opinion - it's definitely in the Boring Technology† Club. It's well known that it's hard to find a more productive tech stack for building server side web apps.

† https://boringtechnology.club/

This, IMO everyone considers Rails as a solid & production ready framework that stood the test of time.

Unfortunately they slept on front-end for too long but seeing a resurgence with a few startups.

I think Mastodon is actually using it.

Rails made Microsoft change its entire web strategy. It influenced so much. Rails is so mainstream that it doesn't get talked about like a hot new tech anymore. If you were a web developer in 2006~2016 it was still hot tech but kind of lost the plot IMO when they really started futzing around with the asset pipeline.

Rewriting the entire asset pipeline like 3 times since Rails 3.x has really killed my enthusiasm for using Rails for server side rendering.

Just to put this into perspective to other people:

Rails 3 was released in 2010

Rails 7 was released in 2022

Considering the speed of change in JS and CSS in 12 years I am pretty haply with only 3 big changes.

Yes, i don't like to fight against the assets pipeline, but to be honest, I just went from Sprockets to Propshaft and never tried to use Webpacker.. you can even still use Sprockets with rails 7, so you could use the whole time, plain Sprockets and you would be doing fine.

That’s fair, I guess I’m comparing it to how stable the controller and Active Model APIs have been. I wish Rails had taken a more hands off approach and let the frontend community plug in their own approaches to tooling instead of taking opinionated stances and then rolling them back after a while. I understand that Rails is “omakase” but I had to learn the frontend tooling, anyway, and the Rails versions are different enough to invalidate that learning.

Next.js isn’t one giant workaround for anything. People were building isomorphic SPAs using React long before Next was created. All Next.js did is to put it all together in a simple framework.

Some googling tells me that isomorphic SPA means the same page can be rendered server side or client side. Is that what it means to you? It's my first time encountering the term. If so ... people were doing that in react??

I’ve been doing that in React since around 2014.

> people were doing that in react??

What alternatives would you propose? Usually when people are surprised by this, digging in reveals that they don’t really know what “client-side rendering” means.

For anyone else out there confused: Next.js != Nest.js.

I don’t think anyone has heard of nest.js and just assume it’s a typo of next.js

It’s really a pity because nest.js is an awesome and very intuitive backend framework. Because it’s written on top of express, the real power comes from being able to drop down to the express layer anytime.

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