Are people using Rails for new startups?
It feels like I haven't heard anything new about Rails for the past five years, but suddenly in the last few weeks it's been a trending topic on HN.
It feels like I haven't heard anything new about Rails for the past five years, but suddenly in the last few weeks it's been a trending topic on HN.
I've seen a ton of different "we're switching to Rails" posts floating around like these -
* https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1ah1b36/is_the_rails...
There's also the new Rails Foundation - https://rubyonrails.org/foundation and their new annual conference, Rails World, which has proved pretty popular - https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1fqizim/rails_world_...
So, Rails ain't dead yet :)
Like other commenters have said, the Hotwire stack plus the new “solid” stack of database adapters is really cool. The general ethos of simplifying the web stack and “compressing the complexity” as DHH says is really appealing.
I’m migrating a personal project from python/svelte and it’s been a ton of fun so far.
Upsides: hilariously easy deployment and development story. Migrations and secrets management is trivial. Everything works. No long searches for third party dependencies.
Downsides: speed (as in compared to a Java backend, for example), and activerecord has a learning curve on performance. Did some bad design decisions on two endpoints that my iOS client depends on and those design decisions hurt badly. They would’ve hurt in any language but hit me much much sooner with Rails.
I would say that it's popularity has definitely waned in the last 10-15 years, probably in part due to Javascript gaining more ground, perceived performance problems with Ruby and the fact that many frameworks in other languages adopted some of Rails's best features (such as convention over configuration, DB migrations, unified project structures, etc.) and ignored its worst parts (such as monkeypatching).
You can check out the source here: https://github.com/freeats/freeats
The changes coming with Rails 8 are really good for small teams working to tight budgets.
The new deployment strategy is amazing compared to some of the complex react, micro services, k8s and cloud stacks I’ve worked with.
They always involve a lot of engineering effort and a lot of expensive proprietary services.
If you want to get off the ground quick for little money a Rails monolith with the frontend using Hotwire still looks very hard to beat.
If Shopify, GitHub, etc can scale to be the largest vendors in their respective markets you know you can too.