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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

I've stopped building on Rails because of things like this. Point releases shouldn't break functionality. I got tired of regression testing my apps for framework changes.

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When I read the blog, the first thing I thought was "boy am I glad I don't use rails". I realize all frameworks and toolkits have issues, but Rails seems to be particularly bad.

I think the big take away here is the importance of apparently redundant sanity checks....

What would be some potential alternatives?

Django?

Play framework, Grails, Node, Django, Revel...

ASP.NET MVC works pretty well these days. It's open-ish source as well, as in you don't need to pay to deploy it on Mono.

I've used it with NHibernate for the ORM and Postgres.

And don't forget the Web API http://www.asp.net/web-api

To rails? Thousands- so much depends on what exactly you need.

  Python? Django, Tornado, Twisted, etc
  Go? "net/http" + Gorilla (http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/)
  Java? JSF 2.0, GWT, Spring, Tapestry, etc etc
  C#? ASP.NET MVC

This list could be almost infinite... or at least could be discussed infinity :)

I've started a side-project using Go + Gorilla. It's actually very nice, but I don't think it's quite as productive for the early-stage as Rails is.

I can certainly recommend Django - I've been working with a large-ish Django codebase for 3 years and have yet to see a security vulnerability as bad as the ones Rails seems to have every month.

Any suggestion that implies Golang + Gorilla is comparable to Rails is poorly informed (and I really like Golang).

"You know what you could do instead of using Rails? Implement your own ad-hoc version of 60% of Rails!"

I don't think that is fair; I did say "so much depends on what exactly you need."

Maybe you don't need to whole kitchen sink. Also its not as though there are not other Go libraries to get other functionality from such as DB/ORM functionality.

What's a good Golang ORM that you could use in a production app?

If people want something like Rails in Golang, it probably makes more sense to point them at Revel. Gorilla is more like Sinatra, for better or for worse.

Yeah, I don't think Gorilla or Revel are quite mature or stable enough at this point to consider as a Rails replacement. And I'm speaking as a (extremely minor) Revel contributor - it's still very young, early adopters only!

Web years are a little bit like dog years. I feel like Revel will grow up fast.

For the record, I have written some Go, but not worked on Revel specifically.

While fully realising that the language itself is pretty terrible, Java + Spring + JavaMail is a pretty good framework and as a bonus involves minimal XML these days.

I'm sure one of the alternative JVM languages would make this setup tolerable to work with, even pleasurable, but I don't know them.

OCaml [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235204

google app engine (based on python)

Symfony2

Sinatra and Padrino are some of the more common Ruby alternatives, especially for smaller sites.

Mojolicious - http://mojolicio.us

They all have issues - sure - but I've never encountered one so likely to break so spectacularly. Then again, it feels like ActiveRecord is a more complex beast than most others I've used.

I've mostly used Hibernate and NHibernate, and SQLAlchemy a few years ago.

I got tired of regression testing my apps for framework changes.

I get tired of paying taxes and brushing my teeth, too, but I still do it, because life will get worse in a hurry if I don't.

I think he's probably talking about dealing with the fallout from failed tests rather than the tests themselves.

Trying to understand where you're coming from here... I should write tests for every portion of the .NET Framework my app uses because it might break on a security update?

If Microsoft had a history of breaking things with .NET framework security patches, then yes, absolutely. That's what people are saying happens with Rails, isn't it?

What are you, crazy? No, what you do is that you jump ship.

To be honest, I've had a lot more problems with gems external to rails than problems with rails itself; and this particular case seems like an issue that should have gotten caught via testing.

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