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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

I've been incredibly pleased with Ktor and Kotlin, as well. JVM underneath, robust libraries, easy to use infra, using Exposed for the ORM which is mostly (genuinely) a joy.

The best thing I think Rails still has is ActiveAdmin. Everything else, I really can take or leave.

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Admin is the one area where Django has the edge, but it's enough on its own for me to push Django over Rails for a lot of "just put a UI around some data, please" use cases.

> The best thing I think Rails still has is ActiveAdmin. Everything else, I really can take or leave.

ActiveAdmin gets you off the ground very quickly, but is also extremely inflexible (and, IIRC, poorly maintained). The last time I worked on an ActiveAdmin backend we had to use all sorts of weird hacks to build the interface the way our backoffice team needed it to be.

AA is really just some wrapper and glue around some other tools… which aren’t super well documented either, but it definitely does mean that a) you can do weird/custom stuff, and that it’s a PITA to figure out how.

In another company I had to completely replace ActiveAdmin with "vanilla" Rails abstractions as it was quite buggy and caused Rails to hang indefinitely as soon as you edited any ruby file. The admin part also turned out to be the most used part of the app, so it probably made sense to replace it in any case, but the bugginess at the time was more than I could handle.

I recall Active admin having really clunky UI a couple years ago. I just checked it again and it looks really sleek!

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