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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s kind of a newbie in rails, but with 10 years of experience in other languages…

It sounds ok to adapt tools if needed (won’t get into whether tools are actually needed, let’s assume they are).

But Rails is supposed to be a giant, everything and the kitchen sink framework bringing everything from an ORM through its own console to scaffolding code generation.

If adding tools to the setup is needed, isn’t then rails the thing to reconsider? Something more modular could probably work better.

Just reading “vanilla Rails” sounds like a red flag. How can that behemoth be considered vanilla?

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> But Rails is supposed to be a giant

All the tools on the article are about client-side rendering and operations.

It's ok if Rails decided to have opinions on client-side rendering and operations now, but it's far from expected. And it would alienate some users.

Instead, the article's conclusion is the correct one. You don't need to mess with complex client-side and ops tools if you don't want to. You can build many things perfectly well without them.

On one hand, I hear you, because Rails has focused on the server side.

On the other hand, Rails has had client-side opinions basically forever; when I started using Rails during the 2.x days in like, 2009, there were helpers that injected JavaScript to make forms better, Rails 3.1 included the asset pipeline, an attempt to compete with webpack, in 2011. Even the current generation of these things has been around for a long time, Hotwire is four years old at this point.

I mean, I think the problem with SPA-like client-side approaches are that there aren't any that have felt _good_ with Rails, let alone great.

Absolutely true that not every app needs to be a SPA from day one, but I do with there were a few more common solutions for "hybrid" apps, which use some pages as a SPA. That said, it's not that bad once you've got it setup. I like that Rails offers a solution like import maps, but I do also wish there were better core functionality for using some kind of package manager.

Like the redis analogy: Whether or not you need Redis, there are good defaults and very good 'third party' solutions for background jobs (or caching). You don't even need Redis is many cases, but it's easy to grow into.

'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together. including much of it that is rendered using other technologies. hotwire? javascript and websockets. The thing that always gets me about Rails (and I am a decades long fan of it,) is that when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes. Sure rails 1.0 didn't have websockets bundled in but it did indeed come built on Prototype.js, which if you still have in a rails 8 project probably gets a lot of laughs. There's a lot more to 'staying current' in a long lived rails app than just upgrading the gems.

>'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together.

That was roughly my point - unless there's something wrong in my mental model, a Rails user is someone who trusts Rails to get them a sane and consistent bundled pack of tools so they can skip the choice and get to work. If one is going to choose a different set of tooling later on, that seems to defeat the point of using Rails in the first place.

I was not judging the framework itself, for the record. Just saying that if you go for it, going "vanilla" seems like the only sensible choice.

>when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes.

this does sound like a major con indeed.

Some of these extra tools are added because someone wants to display "a blog post" using React and so they think they need all those extra tools for FE.

If there is no need for the level of reactivity that is on the level of facebook style then everything provided by a simple rails new is enough.

But I would say that you kinda need to think about the UX with simplicity in mind or else everything becomes a blog with React because everything can be forced to look like it needs to be reactive and do a lot of unnecessary stuff.

> If adding tools to the setup is needed

It is not needed.

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