
Why would you use “Ruby on Rails” for a new React project? - justin808
https://forum.shakacode.com/t/why-would-you-use-react-on-rails-for-a-new-react-project/787/8
======
xiaoma
I would choose Rails if my biggest concern were time to market and server
costs weren't a huge concern.

For any kind of site where you're selling a service or product and for the
vast majority of freemium models, Rails is great. You'll have to scale a bit
sooner than if you chose something like PHP, Node or Go, but you'll have
plenty of revenue to pay for it. You'll also either get to profitability or to
the point where you realize your experiment is a failure a lot faster.

I wouldn't use Rails if I were working on something really simple or if my
plan were to monetize off of ad revenue and a huge base of free users.

~~~
brianwawok
Why compare rails to PHP and node for server costs? They are all similar. If
you care about server costs you use Java or Scala or something with actual
performance...

~~~
xiaoma
Java, and to a lesser degree Scala, would be an eye-brow raising choice for a
startup. That's why I didn't bring them up. However, it's worth pointing out

1) PHP and Node both tend to get significantly better performance than Rails.
Either is more than sufficient for free products. See: Facebook,
WordPress.com, Medium, etc...

2) Java does well in numerical processing, but it isn't necessarily more
performant than node or PHP as a web server and it's a bit of a memory hog.
Keep in mind Paypal realized huge gains from rewriting large parts of its Java
back-end into Node a few years back. Ditto for Groupon.

3) If you're really worried about web server performance, you're probably
better off going with Erlang/Elixirm, a JVM language or Go. If you have
something truly massive (e.g. Google/FB/Amazon), then you'll probably hire
teams to write infrastructure code in C++. Doing that for a normal web app
would be nuts.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Very informative. Thank you.

------
kfrzcode
Ruby is alive and well. A beautifully written language with an incredible
community. Rails only gets stronger and you can look at Shopify for just one
example of very large production rails apps. How about Gitlab? There are many
more.

It's a quick and easy way to iterate a design while getting out of the way.
React can just talk to a rails API and boom you're building the MVP with a
simple rails new command. One command to generate models. It's just fucking
beautiful. And not bloat like node, rack is a few thousand lines. Idk I'm not
an expert but it's just a great platform, why the fuck should anyone not use
it? Plenty of reasons exist but it's the right tool for a set of jobs.

~~~
aphextron
>A beautifully written language with an incredible community.

This is what has always killed me about Ruby. Such a wonderful language,
community, and tooling held back by a painfully slow and inefficient runtime.

~~~
ksec
I am hoping TruffleRuby, which is looking more like a drop in replacement for
MRI Ruby, would solve all these problem.

It will still uses LOT of memory, but memory for most is cheap these days.
Even it it uses double the memory of MRI and gain 10x the processing
performance it is still a net 5x win.

