

Ruby on Rails vs. Node.js - Apane

The question is which should new web developers take up learning, and why? Now, hold your horses - I know that comparing Ruby on Rails and NodeJS isn&#x27;t completely a 1:1 comparison. Rails is a full web framework and NodeJS with ExpressJS is more comparable to the likes of Sinatra - that&#x27;s not the point. The point is going forward which is the more progressive and powerful tool to use to develop user-friendly web applications?<p>Let&#x27;s discuss...
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anonyfox
Meteor.js beats rails in terms of productivity. Also it's in most cases more
performant (node vs ruby thing). It requires some re-learning of how to model
your data (document store vs relational data), but in most cases it's worth
it.

Also soft realtime is the default, shipping mobile/desktop apps aside with
your webapp requires little to no code changes, and even offline working apps
are doable with ease.

Rails was fine 10years ago and popularized many paradigms when it was
important... Now the world moved on and requirements changed heavily. No bad
rap for rails (it paid my bills for many years!) but it left the path of
innovation and is now mainly on the maintenance road and trying to catch up
and thats it IMHO.

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greenlinux
Meteor.js is the future for personal projects. I do not see any jobs for
Meteor.js in any popular job board like indeed.com.

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MalcolmDiggs
I think arguments can be made on either side pretty convincingly.

For me personally, the ecosystem matters most. So the choice comes down to
Gems vs NPM. NPM tends to have what I need the vast majority of the time, and
gets better every day; so I prefer Node.

Here's an interesting comparison of the ecosystems:
[http://www.modulecounts.com/](http://www.modulecounts.com/)

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ShiningRay
There are lots of small, even one-line modules in NPM. So I don't believe the
comparison.

