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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried both AdonisJS and RedwoodJS and can compare the two?

Adonis and Redwood are both trying to be the JavaScript version of Rails/Laravel - a traditional active-record based MVC rapid development server application framework.

The last time I looked for one of these (2018) they were immature and now at least in terms of website and documentation they both appear very capable. But if there’s one thing that JS libraries are good at, it’s marketing and slick documentation.

So, curious to hear any experiences with either and especially both.

Is it actually good?

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I haven't used either so I can't chime in on that front, but long ago I was pretty into Sails which is written by a team that loves rails, but switched to NodeJS so it's basically Node on Rails. I actually thought they discontinued it, but I just searched and it still exists. It was a solid framework like 5 years ago when I used it last so I assume it's quite mature now.

https://sailsjs.com/

5 - 6 years ago I used sails and regretted it because of the assumptions made in waterline about databases. At the time there was no transaction support and joins were a mess. This was pre-1.0, so perhaps it has changed.

These days I use DRF because I like getting the built in Django admin for free. I know it is a bit dated in some ways, but I love the way Django structures things, works for my mental model.

I think something that is somewhat similar but even more fleshed out than Sails is NestJS.

Personally though, I'm just done with server side JS and the dependency hell coming with it.

NestJS is my go to and the reason why I haven't touched Sails in years, but it is more "Angular for the backend" than "Rails for JavaScript" imo.

but I probably should've mentioned it anyway since it has been my node backend framework of choice for quite a while.

I'm kinda with you on that though. I'm actually currently prototyping new services in DotNet Core and am really enjoying it so far.

I looked at AdonisJS, but it has soo many things missing that I'd rather just go with Laravel or Rails. Both of those have been around for so long and have an amazing ecosystem (especially Laravel) and are battle tested.

I've also just lost my trust in JS for any serious long term projects. Things work at first and then a year later all the underlying dependencies have changed and stuff stops working.

Fair criticism of the JS ecosystem. Things are always changing.

Btw, its hard to compare two ecosystems with a checklist. For example, Rails doesn't have inbuilt support for Auth, Authorization or Model factories and you rely on community solutions for those.

Similarly AdonisJS is missing some core integrations like queues and you have to rely on community solutions

Yes, this is why I think Laravel is superior to Rails in terms of out of the box functionalities, but I digress.

In the short term, it's fine to use community solutions, but over time, Adonis should bring those things in-house. They also need to find a proper way to monetize the framework so that the core team has the incentive to stick around for a few years to build something truly great. I think this has been the biggest issue with JS world, very few people can and will stick to working on something for long periods of time to make it really good.

The Laravel team figured out the monetization by building out pro-level tools in their ecosystem that people are willing to pay for.

What is missing for you? I don't see much missing anymore coming from Laravel. There are a few things which I wish were more batteries included, such as "forgot password" but that can be made in minutes with code so it's not a big issue.

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