Comment by hakaaaaak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hakaaaaak | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if they hadn't closed comments before Peter Wagenet, Yahuda, and the rest from the Ember team could weigh in.

I personally like AngularJS a lot, but I also like Rails. Rails 4 has a rails-api project along side of it, which makes it seem like they are starting to spend more time thinking of Rails as provider for a Javascript front-end. Because of Yahuda's involvement, they have also placed more bets on Ember than Angular the last few years.

I think that Angular secretly hides an affinity for backing services in Node, and this concerns me a little. I think their team needs to either provide examples and support for each major front-end framework and not just rely on volunteers to provide those examples that won't be maintained as Angular changes. Or at least be crystal clear about what is expected of a service so that as little code is required as possible on the Angular end to integrate with it. And the same goes for Ember. What good is a front-end MVC framework that depends on services to exist if you have to spend any time guessing what to use on the service-side?

> Because of Yahuda's involvement, they have also placed more bets on Ember than Angular the last few years.

To be clear: I want rails-api to work well with any JS framework that wants to work well with us. Obviously, Ember is a big target, as conceptually, Rails and Ember are very close. That said, I'm a server-side guy: I don't care what is consuming my JSON, just that I serve the JSON up well. If someone who's big in the Angular world wants to come help make Rails super badass at serving up the JSON Angular wants, I'm all for it.

Angular can take any kind of json so it doesn't really matter what rails return. It could re-use ember json format just fine.

AngularJS is agnostic when it comes to json format, it can work with whatever rails-api returns so it could re-use even an ember specific format which is I think the rails format. I've written a rails project to work with angular just fine, you can check it out here: https://github.com/patcito/angularjs_scaffold

It generates everything for you scaffold style :)

Nice project, and I like that you can use regular JS with the --language=javascript option. You should make that clear in the README's title which seems to indicate it is CoffeeScript only. Might also want to get your angular dependency through a versioned gem, not jquery-rails, and have (pre) Rails 4 support branch.

Core Rails, however, isn't moving towards embracing the pure fat client model. (DHH has explicitly ruled out doing so.) That makes me a bit less interested in the benefit of any JS library's Rails integration.

Not DHH, but look at the committers: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api/graphs/contributors

Carlos and Santiago are active Rails 4 core team members, and Steve K. has risen among the core team ranks as well (not to leave the others out).

Yep! A lot of us care a lot about the JSON API case. Since you're mentioning Rails 4, here's the contributors list for the release: http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/edge/contributors

You can see the large overlapping of names there.

Also of note, rails-api includes ActiveModel::Serializers, too: https://github.com/rails-api/active_model_serializers/graphs... You can also find a lot of big names there, as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com