There is a resurgence of interest in Rails recently from the JS community.
THREAD
THREAD
There was an announcement about a JS framework aims to replicate Rails's success with a modern JS stack. Several hundred retweets and 1400+ likes for a framework that doesn't yet exists yet.
@chantastic posted about the "unadulterated bliss" of what Rails give you out of the box and got a ton of engagement from the JS community.
Why all the fuss about Rails? What exactly are all these JS devs wanting that they don't have right now? To answer that let’s start with Ruby.
The Ruby language was designed by @yukihiro_matz to bring happiness and joy to programming and to focus on the "human" factor. It seemed to work because people started to love Ruby and still do.
Check out the "The Philosophy of Ruby" from 2003 to get a full picture of the philosophy right before Rails came into the picture.
artima.com/intv/ruby.html
artima.com/intv/ruby.html
Rails coopted this philosophy and lifted its "doctrinal pillar" straight from Ruby.
rubyonrails.org/doctrine/#opti…
rubyonrails.org/doctrine/#opti…
So Rails had this going for it:
1. Developers loved it
2. Quick dev process
3. It was prescriptive (opinionated and golden path)
Because of these, businesses started to love it.
1. Developers loved it
2. Quick dev process
3. It was prescriptive (opinionated and golden path)
Because of these, businesses started to love it.
Once the businesses were on board the Rails community started to grow like crazy and DOMINATED the Ruby landscape like no other framework/programming language relationship I know of.
This combination of domination of the Ruby landscape, philosophy of golden path (convention over configuration, monolithic architecture, etc) and the fact that so many businesses were using it as their core technology, means that almost every problem has been solved.
And not just solved but open-sourced via an easy to integrate gem or answered on StackOverflow, specifically tailored to Rails. Not only easy to integrate but allow adhering to the core Rails philosophy.
This, I believe, is what JS developers are pining for in this recent flurry of attention. Both with Node and front end JS, there is a framework for every flavor. There are all kinds of benefits to this but one obvious downside is that there is no consolidation of solutions.
There have been many attempts to make a Rails-like system in Node/JS. Probably too many to list. Loopback and Sails are an example. Some would argue express but I think express is closer to Sinatra or Flask than Rails/Django.
It appears there are about to be many more.
Will it work? I don't know. My guess is no. The JS community is so broad and diverse I doubt there will be anything monolithic that will dominate enough to solve a majority of business problems in a single framework like Rails has done.
To cap this thing off, I would still advise building with a full JS stack even though I fully believe in all the benefits that Rails brings to the table. Consolidating to a single language is so beneficial that it overrides the tradeoffs that are made.
