I should probably give some context for that statement. When I first learned Rails, it actually wasn't easy. People will probably be surprised to hear me say this, but Rails felt heavy! Seriously, compared to jdbc, servlets, and jsp, it felt heavy. I'd guess that people who were programming in PHP or perl/CGI probably felt it was "heavy" at first too. Of course, my code base was getting "heavy" too, since it was disorganized and mixed a lot that shouldn't be mixed. But if I wanted to do something, I didn't have to figure out the rails or spring way of doing it. I could go to the java web cookbook, or just write it up however I pleased. It feels a little weird calling jdbc "low level", but at the level of the task I was trying to perform (getting stuff into a database, programming logic on data, putting stuff back into a database, displaying stuff to a user), servlets and jdbc are actually kind of low level. You can do pretty much whatever you want, quick and dirty request-response, or build out your own MVC, ORM, and DI framework.
Now, on the other hand, compared to Struts or Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Spring DI, Rails felt lightweight. But if you compare someone else's MVC framework, like Rails, to a database connection and a programming language that can write out a server response, it's going to feel a little heavy, and you're going to feel a bit lost at first, no matter how good it is.
It took me a while to get used to Rails even though I consider Rails to have a friendly learning curve. So I do want to be clear that I don't necessarily consider Ember to be "heavy" in the context of what Ember seeks to accomplish.
To me, the real issue here is that if I'm going the rails-api route, I will have to use something non-ruby on the client. And then the question becomes why not just use javascript on the server, too, with node.js? Honestly, my initial study and experimenting with node and express have been positive, but I don't like the idea of giving up on ruby, or that all these wonderful server-side languages are obsolete now because for the moment, javascript rules the browser. Nothing wrong with node.js, at all, for those who like it but I have trouble believing that all web development, server side as well as client side, slowly migrates over to javascript, and that python and ruby become legacy languages because, well, why use anything other than javascript?
At this point, I'm just repeating myself, but I'll restate my very tenuously held belief that isomorphic, transpiled languages will play a big role in the resurgence of non-javascript languages for full stack development.
> And then the question becomes why not just use javascript
> on the server, too, with node.js?
I feel this from time to time. There are good things about it, but bad too. I mean, different languages have different strengths, and front and back end seem different, so it would make sense that a language designed for each case is going to maybe be stronger than a language that tries to straddle both.
Now, on the other hand, compared to Struts or Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Spring DI, Rails felt lightweight. But if you compare someone else's MVC framework, like Rails, to a database connection and a programming language that can write out a server response, it's going to feel a little heavy, and you're going to feel a bit lost at first, no matter how good it is.
It took me a while to get used to Rails even though I consider Rails to have a friendly learning curve. So I do want to be clear that I don't necessarily consider Ember to be "heavy" in the context of what Ember seeks to accomplish.
To me, the real issue here is that if I'm going the rails-api route, I will have to use something non-ruby on the client. And then the question becomes why not just use javascript on the server, too, with node.js? Honestly, my initial study and experimenting with node and express have been positive, but I don't like the idea of giving up on ruby, or that all these wonderful server-side languages are obsolete now because for the moment, javascript rules the browser. Nothing wrong with node.js, at all, for those who like it but I have trouble believing that all web development, server side as well as client side, slowly migrates over to javascript, and that python and ruby become legacy languages because, well, why use anything other than javascript?
At this point, I'm just repeating myself, but I'll restate my very tenuously held belief that isomorphic, transpiled languages will play a big role in the resurgence of non-javascript languages for full stack development.