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Cover image for Rails gets out of the way when you need that most.
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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Rails gets out of the way when you need that most.

It's underrated how tough it can be to get a new thing off the ground, and how delicate that phase is.

If a solution is optimized for getting to scale, and not for getting started, it might just be the wrong solution for getting to scale. Hopefully everything we use is capable of the scale we may eventually need of it, but that process will be a windy journey, and you can't even take the first step if you're stuck at the starting gate.

When AirBnB was figuring out what it was, trying new things, running Craigslist adds to try and get customers, Rails was there with some basic ways to provide models, views and controllers. It was opinionated, and ready for the challenge.

For no specific API or pattern or technical solution, I'm still a very excited Ruby on Rails developer. I also love a hypothetical scenario where Forem is eventually rewritten in some kind of way where we can package the whole thing into a tight, radically memory efficient binary. But for now, and probably forever, we're still riding the Rails.

Top comments (17)

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ericchapman profile image
Eric The Coder

I run a small business that hope to be big one day. We choose Rails for the development speed. The competition is so strong and we need something to start fast and right. Rails is just that. We dont care that in 5 years we will have reach the point that we have so many transactions that we need a rewrite in another tech. If we dont deliver now, we would not be there in 5 years anyway!

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linuxander profile image
Linuxander

Rails 6 evolved much from Rails 2, so who knows what will happen in 5 years... Anyway, Rails is not known as fast framework, but it can handle everything if you design application in that way... So in future you will rewrite that code and use it with some other technologies maybe, and that's it. I am big fan of Ruby (and RoR), and the only downside I found is that I must get dedicated server, not VPS like for PHP apps. But when you get quality server with high amount of RAM, business can be started really fast.

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bravemaster619 profile image
bravemaster619

Most servers are VPS nowadays. VPS does not have any problem with RoR. I think what you're meant to say is shared hosting. Shared hosting of WP.

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linuxander profile image
Linuxander

Yea my mistake, wanted to say shared server :)

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superails profile image
Yaroslav Shmarov

For me, the main advantage of RoR is SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT.

And here is the perfect indicator of success with Ruby on Rails:
spreecommerce.org/ruby-on-rails-mo...

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alex_takitani profile image
Alex Takitani

Maybe, there will come a day when what happened to javascript will happen for other script languages.

Or even, if we wait long enough, processors will evolve so much, the memory will be cheaper and all the constraints that we have now will be insignificant.

I remember the days when it was almost impossible to run java apps without destroying the PC. Now that are tons of java apps used daily and no one cares.

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codethug profile image
Nicolas Quijano

Alas, bad habits have made software bloat quote faster than Moore's law predicted hardware speed would double, which hasn't been true since multi cores became standard, we are not even close to a 50% return on parallelization using 2 cores, so.imagine with 16 ? You get a lot of idling thread, cache hits happen a lot more : try maintaining localization of data in gigabytes with hopefully each core running threads accessing the same cache lines....
Fastest era of computing was MacOS 7-8 on PPC 604e at 200 MHz with 1 gig of RAM and 8 PCI slots for a Voodoo1 8 megs and later a Voodoo3 16 megs for a triple display machine that from the day it finalized was only used for graphsims F/A 18 Hornet Korea Flight sim. That mac retailed at 5 grand Canadian with 64 megs of RAM but could run Win95 on Virtual PC 2 faster than a Pentium 166 (years before MS bought it, back when Bungie was a Mac games studio first)
For PCs it was the MS DOS 6.22 era on 486 DX2 or a the centurys turn running Linux and BeOS 5 on a cheap dual Celeron box with with GeForcs 2...
So I tend to code with a lot less RAM bloat, and eye candy must be both dynamically throttled to a minimal extent and user togglable. My Windows still look like win2k

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bravemaster619 profile image
bravemaster619

Ruby on Rails focus on DX (development experience) and I don't know any other language or framework that surpasses Rails in that matter. That's why I'm a big fan of RoR, yay you're on Rails!

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faraazahmad profile image
Syed Faraaz Ahmad

What are your thoughts on the phoenix framework? It's made in Elixir so it's super fast, but it has the MVC and "magic" of rails. Seems like best of both worlds to me. The only downsides I think are lack of a huge community like Rails and maybe even functional programming

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stojakovic99 profile image
Nikola Stojaković

Why is a functional programming a downside? It completely makes sense for the things you will use Elixir for.

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faraazahmad profile image
Syed Faraaz Ahmad

There's nothing wing with it. I meant coming from an OO language like Ruby is s big learning curve

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jvarness profile image
Jake Varness

Ruby uses OO paradigms though. Yes it has functional capabilities, but it can also be OO as well.

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leewynne profile image
Lee

Nice! Love to hear Forem is still a Rails lover.

JumpStart Pro from Chris over at gorails is just amazing. Takes the Rails getting started process to another level.

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chiubaca profile image
Alex Chiu

Such as the way in this industry what is old eventually becomes new again. I would not be surprised if rails becomes "cool" again in the not too distant future.

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bravemaster619 profile image
bravemaster619 • Edited

I love the idea, but Ruby needs to be faster before that.

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omawhite profile image
Omar White

Every time you talk about rails I want to try to learn it haha

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

Same here! haha