
Why I wouldn't use Rails for a new company - snowmaker
http://blog.jaredfriedman.com/2015/09/15/why-i-wouldnt-use-rails-for-a-new-company/
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dankohn1
I chose to use Node/Express at my last startup and Ruby on Rails at my current
one. Both are great platforms with fantastic communities behind them. For
example, there is an amazing amount of Stack Overflow answers and folks
watching for new questions.

It's important to note that Express, the most popular Node framework, is a
clone of Ruby's Sinatra, not of Rails. That's a great back-end when your
front-end is iOS or React and you have a relatively simple data model. But
it's not as strong a solution if you need to do server-rendered pages (which
we need to support IE8).

The bigger issue is that Rails is just a much more mature and full-featured
framework than Express or Sails.js (which is designed to be Rails for Node).
From migrations to validations to strong parameters to many other areas, Rails
just offers a ton of back-end functionality that is not as mature on Node
frameworks. The big question is how much back-end business logic needs to be
implemented.

I haven't run into any issues with Ruby's server performance. AWS instances
are easy to spin up, and any Ruby compute time is almost certainly going to be
overwhelmed by network and database access. The performance we're focused on
is developer productivity, and I think Ruby retains an advantage there over
Javascript (though obviously we use both). If I were trying to support
millions of simultaneous web socket connections, I would almost certainly go
with Node (or maybe Go).

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gdeglin
Could any NodeJS web developers chime in on how suitable Node is for building
larger sites?

My understanding has been that Node web dev frameworks are still difficult to
use for larger projects. Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years?

On an unrelated note, Google search trend charts always struck me as poor
tools to judge popularity of technologies. For instance, here is a chart that
shows "javascript" search volume dropping from 94 in 2004 to 24 today:
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=javascript](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=javascript)

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mastermojo
I played with ruby and rails briefly, and then decided it was not for me. It
felt a bit archaic and it seems like 5-10 years ago it was the best option by
far for a web framework, but today things like node and django have caught up.
I went with django because I like (and am better at) python.

For a new company, pick a scripting language you are most comfortable with (if
it's php, pick your next best language). Then pick the most active framework
from that pool. You can never get to the end of a rails vs whatever debate so
just go ahead and pick a framework you will enjoy working with.

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conanbatt
I remember finding out about different, smaller frameworks to rails back in
2011, and finding bliss in something not as sluggish and cumbersome like
rails.

The key thing for me was that using something else let me learn a lot about
the request cycle while Rails seemed to try to abstract everything away.

I became a better programmer by leaving Rails.

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mrkurt
"Future proofing" by picking what people may want to use in 3 years instead of
using what's most productive right now seems like a serious case of premature-
optimization-itis. Most projects built today won't exist in 3 years.

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Finbarr
There's another potential player in Laravel (PHP framework with similarities
to Rails, with dependency injection), which has grown larger than NodeJS in a
shorter space of time (based on Google trends).

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lnlyplnt
wow that graph at the end. wonder if node is in the midst of a "language
bubble".

