
Is Rails Still Popular in 2018? - joelbluminator
https://medium.com/@yoelblum_45935/is-rails-still-popular-in-2018-d17f3b062b18
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maxfurman
A bug problem I see with the methodology here is that _new_ SO questions
aren't good measures of use - SO is very aggressive about duplicate questions,
and for anything as popular as Rails the common questions have already been
asked.

Anecdotally, my company uses Rails for new client projects all the time, so I
don't think it has fallen as far as the author claims.

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TheRealDunkirk
As someone who has done real work in a LOT of languages over the past 20
years, and has settled on Rails as my tool of choice for the past 10 years or
so (when some requirement doesn't preclude it), what's the alternative? I
really like ActiveRecord, how migrations are handled, the frightenly-expansive
gem ecosystem, and how it allows for any front-end goodies you care to code.
It's not like Rails has sat still either. I struggle to keep up with the new
developments, and I'm making new apps with it every year. As a complete
framework, what is Rails' competition?

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thsowers
One of the competitors in this area is Meteor[0]. I haven't used Django in
many years, but that might also qualify

[0]: [https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/)

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acmecorps
Not OP, but I think he means frameworks using Ruby though, because I'm also in
the same boat as him.

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trelliscoded
There's lots of mature, successful sites using Rails. I'm a devops engineer
for one, and although it's a magnet for technical debt, this firm has done a
pretty good job of keeping it from getting out of hand.

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juststeve
why do you think it's a magnet for technical debt?

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sidcool
Yes. Many people dislike it for reasons of tech coolness. But it's a perfectly
nice framework for quick app development. And the community support is amazing
as well. The testing tools are good too.

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VeejayRampay
So basically Rails is not as popular as it was before, but it seems to have
influenced other successful frameworks.

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juststeve
yeah absolutely but the author doesn't discuss why there was such a decline.

I'd think that part of the reason is people realised that Ruby is slow, and
sometimes it matters.

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copperx
Sure. But the man-hours required to build an app without the gems you would
get for free on Rails is substantial; you would only want to do this if the
app in question _really_ calls for speed.

From time to time I get seduced by the romantic idea of building a simple
JSON-spitting Go/C#/Java backend for an app, but then I realize that I would
have to hand-code an enormous amount of functionality that I would get for
free with Rails.

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juststeve
I don't know enough about rails to comment further, but aside from the fact
it's from Microsoft, i'd think that maybe ASP.NET Web API would be a
reasonable choice for simple REST Services? (downside is it only really
deploys on Windows Server)

