There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you, but I want nothing to do with either, and do not have problems that those are meant to solve. I love ruby, and I love rails.
DHH regularly sounds the drum of rationality - in a community at large of idealists and extremists. He is the reason I got into programming, and constantly serves to remind me that what I'm doing is, in fact, perfectly fine; and that everyone else puts up with a lot of nonsense for no great reason.
There are other frameworks out there, but you'd be hard pressed to find one with a leader that has such a sense of direction and reason for why the framework does what it does, and does not.
You should check out Scott Wlaschin's talk, Domain Modeling with F# if you get the chance. https://vimeo.com/97507575
It might be hard to believe now, but Rails also went through this stage of vocal supporters advocating for it over alternatives. If you go back and watch the introduction video [1], you have DHH creating a blog in 15 minutes using RoR. I remember being impressed by it and vocally pushing for it where I worked then. :)
Can you give examples of the 'lot of vocal people' saying 'you should be doing everything in Go or Angular'? I don't see this. I only hear this kind of black/white sentiment when filtered via junior devs.
Experienced devs I know get there are trade-offs. And I don't see anyone on the React/Angular/Vue teams saying that server-sidey Django/Rails/etc. apps are 'wrong'.
Nope. This is a misnomer that get's passed around a lot, and it's not based on anything factual. It's also dangerous, because people will read that and think "oh, i guess rails is bad". but it's not.
When you leverage the framework and best practices, it's great. There are different styles that can make things more complex, sure - but that's by no means the fault of rails.
People can go overboard at any level of the stack - rails won't stop you from this. Things can get sloppy and not perform efficiently - or become convoluted. again - not the fault of rails.
Sometimes, you need a little magic. Ruby (and rails) makes this possible. But if you rely heavily on magic, it'll bite you in the end.
But the great ones restrict how you can do those things down to a few patterns (in a way that doesn't actually seem like a restriction).
Maybe I've drank the kool-aid too much, but I agree with this whole-heartedly.
It reminds me of when I want to paint a room. I can go to Home Depot and spend an hour picking out all the tools I need, or I can buy one of those pre-packed toolkit and get to the actual painting immediately.
Rails + Heroku = My product will be ready to demo by end of the week.
Obviously this mentality only applies to people like me who wants to get things done quickly. People who value craftsmanship and specificity should do what pleases them. (That's not to say you can't do quality work with pre-packed toolkits)
But can it truly be said that Rails has a purpose today? Its default performance remains lousy with any kind of load. Its convention-first approach means Rails knowledge doesn't easily generalize, as can be seen in this very comment thread from the experience of those who've approached the Node ecosystem as though it were "Javascript on Rails". The "history? what history?" attitude of its BDFL and his clique makes cause for trepidation out of the prospect of maintaining a Rails app over a significant length of time. And even by comparison with ES5, Ruby is a hot mess.
I get that DHH has to defend it. It's his baby, after all. But it's been a long time indeed since Rails had anything unique to offer beyond an ideology which is, in its own way, every bit as much a straitjacket as RMS' - and Rails' inheritors have innovated in ways that straitjacket makes it very hard at best for Rails to match.
You can say a lot about Rails but I like the idea that everything I commonly need as a web developer is most likely already in the framework, and there is usually a best practice way to do things. Options are great, but moving out of plumbing and into generating value to customers is still having a value.
If you don't like opinionated, batteries included solutions then Rails is not for you.
However there are other solutions that kind-of cloned some aspects of Rails. Playframework (Scala has a lot more similarities to Ruby IMHO than to Java, at least in philosophy). Also Spring Boot or JHipster (Spring boot + Yeoman - super opinionated)
> That people spent hours, if not days, just setting up the skeletons. The basic build configurations.
I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again.
> The vast majority of activity today is for yet another option on the a la carte menu.
Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.
Maybe I worked on a bad project. Maybe I didn't get it. Maybe it was a growing pain that has passed. Rails was a pain in the ass to get to work. The ORM was cool, but did it save me time or mistakes from writing SQL - no.
I would love other people's opinions who have stuck with Rails.
However, I'd just like to point out that in the same span of time JavaEE has undergone significant simplification (omakase API standards, anyone ;)) and if you check out the work of Adam Bien, you'll quickly find old myths of bloated memory consumption and fiddly XML configuration debunked.
Java is also lucky to have a parallel full-featured stack in the Spring ecosystem. Projects like JHipster do an opinionated take on how to wire things up and take you to quickly to orbit.
So basically, I disagree with DHH that there is "Very little activity in integrated solutions."
Besides, if for 133 rails jobs and 763 PHP jobs there are 60 and 1500 rails and PHP candidates (respectively,) you're clearly better off choosing rails.
https://www.quora.com/session/David-Heinemeier-Hansson/1?sri...
I wish that I had a more complex web app to do because it would be fun to get reacquainted with Rails. That probably won't happen since I have been going it the opposite direction, having updated a few Sinatra and PHP sites to be 100% static, and using cloud storage and CDNs.
I've developed and deployed several 'real world' web apps in Padrino now. I looked at Rails in the early days, but for some reason could never really get to grips with it (probably because it was too opinionated for me). Sinatra/Padrino's DSL methodology seemed to sit better with me, and I ran with it.
[0] - http://www.padrinorb.com
I hear this a lot about Django. The ORM is really good but "not as good as SQLAlchemy". The templates are great but "Jinja is better".
The thing is that as an engineer I value that the components are incremental improvements with sane defaults where change is deliberate and the benefits of what I'm missing out on are truly, honestly irrelevant. There's really very few times where I said to myself, "Oh of only my templating language had better support for these idioms". I just write a decent workaround because I've been using the same tool for years and it's maintainable and the total number of workarounds is so small that there are no good reasons to switch to an alternative even in the long term.
This is much better than the alternative of looking for 5 alternatives for the same component, discarding the first 3, using one for a month until I find it has fatal flaws, and finally settling for the last one.
I've used Ruby sporadically as gap-fill in small projects, but I didn't feel the language has any qualities that sets it apart from others.
Perhaps I missed something, any Ruby devs care to comment?
Just to add, my work revolves around the JVM ecosystem, but mostly in Scala and some Kotlin... Both already provide a nicer interface for Java :) e.g. in the context of collections both have `list.head` or `list.first` and `list.last`.
> You get to use Ruby, which, even in a world that has rediscovered the benefits of functional programming and immutability, remains the most extraordinarily beautiful and luxurious language I’ve yet to encounter.
He's saying there are other beautiful paradigms - especially of the FP variety. However, Ruby is really, really damn elegant.
And he's right; it's a joy. [I say as a C++ dev]
In terms of jobs prospects and similarity to Rails/Ruby what do you guys recommend ? Java ?
The web is increasingly moving frontend and the system of 2018 onwards will simply be the M in MVC.
Note, I'm not saying Rails is not worth learning. I'm just saying it's now the Cobol of web technology.
My question to you is this: why do you believe that? I think we have all witnessed a growth in popularity in front-end MVC frameworks, but are they the correct solution to all problems?
I mean, kind of. You don't really need much controller logic most of the time anymore. Last Rails backend I wrote probably involved personally writing a few lines of code here and there. Generally, I'm just pushing a JSON object back and forth. Auth and emails can just be 3rd party. The vast majority of controller type behavior ends up client side at this point. Partly, because its way simpler to scale with you push as much processing to the client as you can. Also, look at something like Firebase or Hoodie as examples of simple stores that require no backend logic.
Its not that Rails and Symfony are useless, I use them all the time, its just that they are kind of dated concepts. Heck even Wordpress solves a specific problem on the backend enough to be useful sometimes. That said Drupal at this point is such a dated concept(superseded by things like Rails and Symfony many years ago) that is should no longer be used.
ES6 has taken the edge off of some of the more obnoxious parts of JavaScript, but it still has a long way to go to catch up to Ruby, and Express is a cheap imitation of Rails.
It takes me over a day to get an Express application up and running. There's dozens of dependencies to wrangle into place. There's hundreds of lines of code to sketch in even the most basic of applications. So many directories to create, so many new files you have to basically build by hand. There's Gulpfiles to configure. There's a lot of work to integrate Passport. It's a lot of work to get as far as "Hello, world".
Meanwhile rails new and some Gemfile dependencies get you almost all the way there within an hour. Then you're making database migrations and laying in CSS and layouts.
I love both Node and Ruby for different reasons, but the out-of-the-box experience for Express is total garbage. You can't even parse a cookie without installing a module for that.
Node is way easier to create real-time services, like a Socket.io server in JavaScript is way less fuss than Ruby+EventMachine. It absolutely kills it when writing thin JSON APIs, and in terms of performance it's ridiculous. There's nothing preventing Node from having a Rails-like easy start for web applications but the attitude of the community where making decisions for people and having sane defaults is apparently against the rules.
I feel so much better after seeing this sentiment here. I've tried to dip my toe into the node.js world repeatedly only to feel like I'm trudging through setup for hours.
Of course I may have incorrect memories of how difficult/easy it was to set up my first rails app however long ago.
Lots of frameworks get you into tech debt quickly. This isn't good. What does it do to get you OUT of tech debt?
You misunderstood DHH's point. He's talking about well-integrated defaults. He isn't talking about preventing people from using other modules if they choose to do so.
I mean, if your developers want to try the hot new thing every week, Rails isn't the problem. That much should be obvious.
I used to have this problem too -- more so in the early days of asset pipeline. Mostly when trying to use some client side framework. Rails is working on (or maybe already available, I'm not sure) yarn/webpack support.
> Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.
Replacing the batteries which are included can be painful at times. If you want to use the new hotness in Rails, it comes at a price of extra work getting it working... but it only seems painful when comparing to the included batteries -- they just work. Support for different test frameworks, orms, templating languages are pretty good anymore though and are easier to swap out.
You'll definitely have a better experience with Rails if you forego the desire to run the latest and greatest and just use what Rails already has.
Granted, it's been a couple years since I dealt with any Rails apps. That's in large part by design, because every Rails app has a relatively high curation cost just to keep it up to date with the latest and greatest, and you have to do that if you want to be able to add features or usefully maintain anything without undue agony, because the Rails community has the collective memory of a goldfish and even less interest in maintaining continuity with the past.
I get that that's the big selling point, the drum DHH and his fans never stop beating: "Rails is omakase." This is a fundamentally broken metaphor, because sushi is dead by the time it gets to you, and all you have to do with it is eat it; the history of the ingredients is of little consequence. Would that software were so simple.
- depending on third party packages can be a pain
- switching environments / languages is annoying
The argument that these things disappear with Rails is weak.
The historical argument that a dynamically typed language can handle these issues more gracefully than J2EE is valid but less relevant today.
I do think that's pretty true of the JS ecosystem though. There are things like Sails, but most of the "new" stuff that comes out is build systems, tools, small libraries, and view libraries.
As to why... it's anyone's guess.
My guess is that making a full-stack opinionated framework like Rails is a big undertaking, and most people are focused on what they see as "quick wins" -- solutions to the obvious surface-level pains like "npm is slow" and "making forms with React is hard" that can gain traction quickly and rise to stardom on Github.
Maybe this is cynical to mention, but fame and recognition (and maybe interesting job offers) seem to be a big driving force behind the constant influx of new and better JS libraries/tools.
I think its because recreating rails in javascript just doesn't make sense in the current ecosystem. Either you are rewriting stuff like express from scratch (and why are you doing that?), or you're building on top of those modules and adding configuration conventions and scripts, in which case, congratulations, you've just written Sails.
When Rails first got started, ruby didn't have anything close to the ecosystem that JS enjoys today, so DHH et al. had to write most of the individual components themselves, with the intention of making them all work together.
So in my view, its similar to how Humans and Gorillas evolved from a common ancestor, but you won't see Gorillas becoming Human anytime soon.
It will never have strong-typed discipline though... (sad)
Some of the stuff it does is pretty much voodoo to me at this point. But - it's voodoo that makes me think - even say out loud to myself, sometimes - "wow". I can see how it's amazing that it does what it does with so little code. I can see how this is an enormous benefit to getting a project up and running. I can see how it'll potentially save me hours and hours of configuration.
That's a great benefit, but it comes at the cost of understanding. What exactly is that line of voodoo doing? I dunno. How do I troubleshoot it if it doesn't work? I dunno. Like, I have no idea.
[1]: As the first real "language" I'm trying to actually properly learn, so take my comments in that context. I am not already an experienced coder. I want to be able to knock up little projects, proofs of concept, in a reasonable amount of time. Rails, to me, seems like the framework that will allow me to do that. We'll see.
I can't speak to Rails, but I've worked in other codebases that used reflection to dynamically attach different pieces of code together. It was hard to trace code because I couldn't do a search for the value being generated nor could I use the static analysis to find the value. I had to manually trace through the whole stack to find the bit of reflection that was generating a value.
Right, so clearly Rails is not for you. No harm no foul.
This is essentially the point of rails, that I as an engineer don't care enough about those details, because I need to get something working quickly. if it gets to a point where it matters (because it actually does, say, when you're trying to scale) you can invest the time to learn how it all works and either improve it or say ... "you know what, I think we should ditch this entire thing"
Simple.
Quoting DHH, the Rails pitch was use Ruby for everything:
> The core premise of Rails remains in many ways as controversial today as it was when it premiered. That by formalizing conventions, eliminating valueless choices, and offering a full-stack framework that provides great defaults for anyone who wants to create a complete application, we can make dramatic strides of productivity.
That premise is irrelevant today. A complete application today isn't just a website. It's a website, a phone app, a car app, a TV, a kiosk, a conversational bot, etc. Choosing even the highest common denominator across all those platforms means eliminating unique opportunities to delight the user.
If now the premise of Rails is that it's a great way to generate JSON on the server, sure but that's a fraction of the stack. The selling point for Rails is now simply an aesthetic choice between Javascript and Ruby. DHH admits as much with his closing argument:
> Just look at some code. I dare you not to fall in love.
Since the core premise of Rails remains full-stack, plugins at best are a cycle behind innovation. Conventions have to be explored elsewhere before they can be formalized, and before choices can be exposed as valueless. At worse, plugins are multiple cycles behind innovation due to pointless infighting.
This just seems way too slow, I'd rather get my hands dirty today.
[1] or process containers, let's not get bogged down in vendor details.
Sticking with Ruby betrays that aesthetics are really the core premise of Rails, rather than aspirations of being the one framework to link all run times and in the darkness bind them.
Frankly, node needs such a framework.
1. Easy to deploy
2. Integration tests are a breeze
3. Debugging is a breeze
We use a distributed architecture in clojure and python where I work, but it has its own downsides, and for a lot of people monoliths are a much better solution.
Rails was unique in its time in that it shipped with solid client-side DOM manipulation (prototype.js). It supplied a "full-stack" framework that made it easy to build a dynamic, AJAX Ux.
But lately the "best practices" in the node ecosystem move so fast that any default may soon be outdated. What would today's javascript Ux best practice be? Vue.js? React? Angular? Which state management solution is "best" ? Which CSS framework is "best" ?
Any choice you make will be out of date by the time you ship. There's a ton of activity. It's a decision that belongs on the project, not the framework.
Frameworks aggregate many dependencies. Managing the dependencies that deliver value while ignoring those that are irrelevant can net out as more productive.
> A complete application today isn't just a website. It's a website, a phone app, a car app, a TV, a kiosk, a conversational bot, etc.
I disagree pretty strongly with that. A complete application can be any one of those things. Sure, if you have a need for all of those at once, then Rails isn't going to be your one and only tool. But it could still well be the tool for your complete web application, and at the same time your API server for (some/all) of the other tools.
> DHH admits as much with his closing argument
No, he says that Ruby's beauty is an additional reason to use it. It's hardly an admission that it's all that differentiates Rails from other options.
Hell Ruby has RubyMotion that allows you to write native apps.
Where's the evidence for this claim DHH/Rails is the only rational force in a sea of extremists?
(Of course the dull reality with real apps is "it's complicated" and most devs are busy grappling with that).
... Can we please call it Rusty Rails?
JS is actually a decent language, and imho with more recent advancements better still. Combined with npm there is simply anything you might need available (for the most part). Not that there aren't a lot of gems out there.
In the end, having one language to think about, rather than how to shoehorn communications and logic between two languages is simply more difficult. I went, similarly from C# to node, not because I didn't like C#, but because the friction in writing JS on the server and the client was so reduced from two differing languages throughout the day.
Similarly a lot of devs went to simpler data stores so they don't have to deal with layers of ORMs that only half work, and can simply store and query basic data forms. Mongo fits this development model well, early hiccups in the technology aside.
In the end, it allows you to build web apps in one language, and not have to write translations to get from one to the other on the client.
I've helped maintain REST APIs in both Java and NodeJS at different points in time.
Doing so in Java was always a painful iterative process; ask the ORM for data, painstakingly map the data to Java DTOs created mostly for defining JSON structure, pass it off to RESTEasy or some similar framework, see how the JSON turned out. Adjust and repeat until satisfied. Yuck.
In NodeJS, by contrast, fire off the SQL to get the data, map into the JS object that you need and return it.
Kind of funny how, years back, a selling point of GWT was that you could use the same language across the stack. It wasn't a bad idea, just a poor choice of language.
One can argue that Ruby is prettier, but JS can be very good with thoughtful api design.
ES5, for me, was a complete surprise because I wasn't really expecting to enjoy using it. Perhaps I let myself be unduly influenced by the crowds ;-).
Prototypical inheritance is surprisingly nice. It is a simple concept and it is obvious exactly what's going on under the hood (if you care to look ;-) ). It allows a lot of functionality without requiring a large amount of language syntax. Ruby, on the other hand, has a more complicated (perhaps one can say more sophisticated) system, but requires a lot of language features to implement. Things like method_missing and all of the meta programming features feel bolted on.
ES5 has this really nice core design where language features just pop out. So private accessibility is done simply by using closures, etc. You have higher order functions without the absolute craziness of procs and blocs. Even things like mixins and traits are incredibly easy to implement with a couple of lines of code. Ruby, on the other hand, is a kind of byzantine structure where everything is bolted on with C code and the language itself is rather inflexible.
I really like the idea in ES5 that classes are simply functions that return an object. Hooking up inheritance structure is a complete PITA, but conceptually the design is really clean. Even the idea that objects are simply hashes and that methods are simply functions in a hash is really nice. Even the weird this pointer is at least consistent (despite being practically useless).
Where ES5 gets its bad reputation is in type/data coercion (which it shouldn't do at all IMHO, and it certainly shouldn't do it the way it does it). It also has a truly awful standard library -- to the point where most experienced developers simply avoid it! My main other problem with ES5 is that it is overly verbose, but this is something I feel that is shared with Ruby in many ways.
IMHO, use of a transpiler is just a good idea with ES5 because while the core of the language is excellent, the stuff surrounding it is full of pitfalls. I personally like CoffeeScript quite a lot and honestly prefer writing CS to Ruby. Typescript seems like it is also quite nice, though I haven't used it. Lately I've been playing with Purescript and while it is legitimately a different language compiled into JS, I really enjoy reading the compiled JS output, because it often compiles into something very elegant.
Conclusion: Ruby is fine, but ES5 is just a lot more elegant internally and it is much easier for me to use it intelligently to produce nice code. Ruby has a much better standard library, but language features are bolted on without them being driven by an internal design. Basically, I think they think "Hey, this would be a convenient syntax. Let's write the C code to make that work." without really evaluating whether there is any internal consistency. Some people may actually consider that a plus, but I prefer simpler languages. Note that I feel that in many ways ES6 is wandering over in this direction and I am somewhat disappointed with it. I was happy you specified ES5 in your question, because a similar question about ES6 would have been harder for me to answer.
> ...or you're building on top of those modules and adding configuration conventions and scripts, in which case, congratulations, you've just written Sails.
This doesn't jive with a lot of what's been done in the JS community, at least frontend anyway. There are a TON of libraries that already had perfectly good implementations, where people just decided to reinvent the wheel because they "couldn't find any X library that did what they needed." (see: anything to do with forms)
Backend too, though. There's Express, Koa, Hapi, and more. They all basically do the same thing.
Maybe it's just a difference in mindsets -- maybe JS devs prefer light libraries they can cobble together vs. kitchen-sink frameworks? But then there's the counter-example of the popular frontend frameworks (Angular 1/2, Ember), so I'm not so sure that applies universally either.
That said, I don't see Sails gaining a ton of traction even though it's been around for quite some time yet, and with it's security settings and beta status I don't feel great about building production apps with it yet.
There's an attractive opportunity for code reuse.
Have a preference for process pools over thread pools so don't mind the execution model. Would not be surprised that some applications are better served by other backends like akka etc. Elixir is on my list to learn.
That does of course play into the position that a great "full stack" framework is a thing of the past.
This is definitely a pain you'll feel with rails, and any other combination of software pieces which you bring together.
For what it's worth, within the last month, I've touched rails 3.2, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, and 5.0.1 apps which are running in production. It's possible to maintain these apps on old releases, but the idea of never upgrading will be painful in the end.
As one example my web app Gulpfile has evolved significantly from the first iteration and it would take multiple days to recreate all of that from scratch.
The Rails Asset Pipeline might be obnoxiously rigid, but at least it works without having to tear your hair out.
Each chunk is fairly small, but they add up. You want linting, auto-restart on changes, tests, your various asset chains to compile things correctly, etc.
Lots of things are possible - but not everything is a good idea - or is, but could be done in a clearer way.
I used to work at places where we cared deeply about our code. You should see some of the code reviews from one of the places, sometimes they got kinda ridiculous and people got into arguments about coding style and the discussion never ended... But the code was great. I kept it for some time after leaving the job and I looked at it to see how good a Rails project can be. Ah, we had over 90% code coverage from the beginning too.
Without Rails, I don't think that codebase would have been as maintainable as it was.
Then at my next job after that, I was hired as a Rails developer. Rails was a dependency and they used controllers and views and wrote the most insane code I have ever seen. Not that many tests, and the tests we had required a significant amount of setup and no one really knew how to run them (and make them pass).
I'm used to Rails being nice and friendly to work with, so joining a project where they fucked up everything really sucked, because I know what it's like to work in a good rails app.
The thing is Node could offer the Rails out-of-the-box experience through a package that provided sane defaults. There's nothing preventing people from doing this but cultural resistance.
Walmart labs has contributed some great out-of-the-box, with hapi.js and now http://www.electrode.io/
Those are good examples of steering in the right direction, but it's still a long way off.
There are a large number of projects offering a Rails-style OOTB experience in Node. None of them is blessed as the Node framework. This is because there is no one to do the blessing. Node's developer culture being one you find unsatisfactory is not an example of "resistance". It is an example of difference. And if you do not find the Node style to provide you comfort, there is absolutely no requirement anywhere that you partake of it.
Which would these be? Even the best tend to fall far short of the full Rails experience.
> And if you do not find the Node style to provide you comfort, there is absolutely no requirement anywhere that you partake of it.
Translation: "If you don't like it, fuck off."
That's not how the Node community has treated me as long as I've been a part of it. The people I've interacted with are often very welcoming, encouraging and responsible. I'm talking about cultural conventions, not individual attitudes.
The difference is that the Node world is used to things taking time to put together. The Rails world finds this to be unbelievably fussy. Python people from the Django realm are in the middle.
To promote a new way of doing things, like Rails did, is an effort way beyond my singular capability. It will require a lot of like-minded individuals to go "You know, maybe we could make something that wraps around Express and gives you a Rails-like experience for those that want it." and then work towards making that happen.
Your best bet is to search for Foo boilerplate, where foo is what you want to work with, and start from one of many thousands of starting points.
I think the resistance is generators take time and persistent upkeep, while a boilerplate can exist as it is and upgraded intermittently.
In the end, I'd rather work with a lego bulk pack, than the prescriptive kits.
I also threw my standard gulpfile into a git repo, so if I need it, it's there.
Lastly, I built a yeoman generator. Now, not only is my gulpfile standardized, but I have the rest of my skeleton application built in a matter of minutes. All my favorite libraries/npm modules, custom scss files, basic routing to the standard pages of a simple site, are all built out for me to my preferences while I make a cup of coffee. You can even provide yourself command line flags to determine whether or not to include tests, which preprocessors for html or css you prefer, etc. Really a worthwhile investment.
Write once, utilize many times.
In a sense complaining about this the Node world is like asking fish how they can stand being wet all the time. It's just part of the terrain.
I'm not saying what Node is doing is fundamentally wrong, but that this almost absurd aversion to making decisions for users is sometimes a bad thing.
For example, I'd love to be able to declare dependencies for an NPM module that are open-eneded, like "any one of A, B, or C will do", but like it is with Ruby, Python, etc. you must declare all or none.
I'm not trying to restrict choice, just cover the base condition of when you don't care of providing a sane default.
To a degree Rails has this: The first thing I do in a new project is jettison all the garbage I don't want (see you later turbolinks) and drop in all the things I do want. It's actually just a few lines to manipulate, so I can hardly complain.
In the Node world there's a lot of hand-holding required to get even the most basic application up and running. I can see this getting cut down dramatically if you had things like "npm install express +extras" where there was some way of saying "plus whatever other stuff you think is a good idea", or even an "express-fully-loaded" version of the package that comes with a bunch of stuff out of the box.
I really like Gulp and when configured it gives you an amazing amount of control over your build process. Although the Rails Asset Pipeline system works as a pretty good default out-of-the-box they really should steal some ideas from Gulp on configurability for those occasions where you want to change the default behaviour.
Vinyl.fs (https://github.com/gulpjs/vinyl-fs) is an amazing thing that the Ruby world desperately needs.
In the end it boils down to: Start with a monolith and chisel away the stuff you don't want - RoR, or start with a skeleton and add what you need as you need it.
If you like, but that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is instead that you're not going to find value in Node the same way you do in Rails, and complaining that Node is not Rails will not change that in the slightest. Neither will approaching Node as though the first thing to do is make sure your project tree contains every piece of functionality your app might ever conceivably need. Gulp, for example, is extremely powerful, but also has an enormous complexity cost. NPM is a task runner, too, and shell scripts can be fine for a surprisingly long while. I'm not sure what led you to think you need Gulp to get to "Hello, World". But part of using Node effectively is understanding that you are, in the end, responsible for the choices of tooling you make. If Gulp seems like more work than necessary to solve a simple problem, it probably is! Think about using something simpler instead. No one will force a choice on you, either in favor of Gulp or against it. The other side of that is that no one will make a choice for you, either. That's on you. If you'd rather it not be, this may not be the toolset for you.
Although, again, there are a lot of seeds and starters. I don't use them myself much, because I already have a battle-hardened stack that's simpler than most of them anyway, but I hear very good things of Sails. I wouldn't expect it to replicate Rails in full, but what I've heard suggests it will get you closer than most. Even here, though, you have to choose; there are no BDFLs and no One Right Way.
I'm not here to suggest a One Right Way, either. I do think the Node style is better in a few ways, not least of which is that, in exchange for paying a higher setup cost up front, you become less likely to run into teething troubles later on, especially in the realms of scaling and keeping the codebase up to date where I've observed Rails very frequently to have major problems. On the other hand, it can be considerably easier to start with Rails, especially if you're unfamiliar with it, and not strongly or at all supported by people who are - precisely because it relieves its user of the responsibility of making choices that user may not yet be prepared or equipped to make.
But all of that is an opinion that I'm having, and opinions certainly do differ. That doesn't gravel me. What does gravel me is seeing someone complain at considerable length about one style because it isn't exactly the same as another. That seems unlikely to produce any especially worthwhile result, either for the one who does it or for his interlocutors.
The "translation" there is how comments like that are perceived. "Put up or shut up" is not a good way to build community. Yes, obviously we have options, but the amount of commitment it takes to go with some of them is a lot higher, and in many cases needlessly so.
> I'm not sure what led you to think you need Gulp to get to "Hello, World".
If you have a non-trivial plan for what your application is going to do and you're intending to iteratively deploy it then you really do need an asset handling plan. Gulp does a great job of this if you spend the time to configure it correctly. With ~200 lines of configuration I get minification, compression, asset hashing, linting, auto-starting, and more. In some important areas that's ahead of Rails, especially in terms of control.
I'm talking about cultural concerns here, about the experience of someone new trying to build a Node application and needing to cobble this all together themselves. It took me about six months of iterative work to come up with a reasonable environment to build Node + Express apps. It took me two weeks to get settled into Rails back in 2005, and I've walked people through the same process with every version since Rails 1 and it's rarely more than a few days of coaching. This friction is something that's a serious problem and no amount of hand-waving dismissal of "that's just how Node is" will change that.
If you want to bring new people into your platform, into your culture, into your community you should make a better effort to lay out how things can or could be done. It shouldn't involve foraging through blog posts, Stack Overflow answers, and pestering co-workers for snippets of code, assembling a veritable quilt out of them that you pass on to others like some sacred heirloom.
For example, I'm consistently impressed with the quality of the documentation Node projects have, even humble ones with obviously limited appeal. The Ruby world is filled with crusty, opaque code with half-assed documentation that's often wildly out of sync with the shipping version, even for foundational components like Rake, Rack, or Rubygems.
If Node had a softer start for those that wanted it, respecting the culture of being able to pick and choose on a very granular level, I'm sure people would be more productive, use it on more projects, and contribute more back into the community. This is a lost opportunity.
But, in general, "friendly, fast, and forgiving" is exactly how I've always found the Node/Express tooling and ecosystem to be, while Rails has been among the least welcoming stacks I've ever had the displeasure to use - and, to your point about having to commit, in deciding "Rails: never again" I essentially threw away most of a year's worth of professional experience, which was so Rails-specific as to offer nothing useful in any alternate context. That's a choice I'm glad I made, rather than chasing the sunk cost, but if we're going to talk about things that require a lot of commitment, I think we have to talk about that kind of thing, too.
Based on the apparently almost mirror-opposite nature of our experiences with these platforms, I'm inclined to wonder whether the characteristics of either are strongly to blame, or whether instead it's a question of preference, or congruence between personal style and that of the platform, or just good vs. bad first impressions.
Not least to that last point, I do agree that a more reliably findable onboarding experience might be warranted. But it does sort of come down to "put up or shut up", harsh as that may sound; again, without a BDFL or a One Right Way, there is no one to mandate such a thing must be done, and thus, until someone comes along with the knowledge and the passion to do it, that thing does not get done. There's some degree of cost in that, to be sure. But the difference in engagement makes it reasonable to ask whether it's as much of a problem as it might seem.
An example[1] work in progress boilerplate I've been heading towards as time permits, will probably have it flushed out by the end of next month, including migrating to the latest webpack.
Of course a lot of the reason for options, is there are so many... server rendering, react v angular, angular 1 or 2+, bootstrap or foundation or ??? In the end, it's great in some was and not so much in others. I, like you prefer to have the choice/control.
Frameworks like rails are great at getting you 85-90% of the way to done... but that other 10-15% is so painful, you're often better off with DIY in the long run.
https://github.com/tracker1/react-redux-materialui-boilerpla...