Over the last few months I evaluated django, laravel, and rails by doing their tutorials.
So far rails has been my favorite to rediscover, I used it 10 years ago and boy has a lot changed!
I was hoping to like django more since I'm a professional python dev, but django felt like I was still clobbering together libraries (whitenoise, celery, etc) and it doesn't have a great front end story.
Laravel was super slick, but I just can't do PHP. I know it's come a long way but it's just not for me.
Rails really stuck for me the most and I really like the hotwire paradigm. As a dad with limited time for side projects Rails is going to be the tool for me now to spin up something quickly.
I'm actually porting over a current side project to rails and stumbled on this magical gem called "Brick"[0]. You just point it at your existing DB then it reads the current state of the database and makes active record models in memory for you to play with. You can then eject the models and controllers into your code base, and bam you have your model layer recreated in rails.
One of the things I love about working with rails is the incredible ecosystem reflecting the elegance, economics, and ambition that exist in Ruby itself.
Rails brings a certain intolerance to BS - boilerplate, verbosity and in general anything that gets into the way of flow.
I used to work with Django 10 years ago, and I loved it.
I totally agree it looks totally outdated nowadays and I wouldn't pick it over the other alternatives. It's incredibly how bad it looks if you're going to need anything else than an API.
So far rails has been my favorite to rediscover, I used it 10 years ago and boy has a lot changed!
I was hoping to like django more since I'm a professional python dev, but django felt like I was still clobbering together libraries (whitenoise, celery, etc) and it doesn't have a great front end story.
Laravel was super slick, but I just can't do PHP. I know it's come a long way but it's just not for me.
Rails really stuck for me the most and I really like the hotwire paradigm. As a dad with limited time for side projects Rails is going to be the tool for me now to spin up something quickly.
I'm actually porting over a current side project to rails and stumbled on this magical gem called "Brick"[0]. You just point it at your existing DB then it reads the current state of the database and makes active record models in memory for you to play with. You can then eject the models and controllers into your code base, and bam you have your model layer recreated in rails.
[0]: https://github.com/lorint/brick