I worked with Rails and Phoenix in their early days and got plenty of value from each. If you're building a traditional web 2 app, look no further...similar to choosing Postgres, start there until you have really good reason to venture off.
Without taking away anything from these frameworks and as someone that spent over 10 years building app frameworks, sometimes it's not what I want.
I'm using Clojure for my current problem space which would stymy me if I tried to use Rails or Phoenix. I spent the past 4 months doing product/domain "shaping". There are no web pages yet..mostly pure server side domain and API calls for data gathering. After this exploration I now have several working subsystems and have figured out the pathway to the mvp which will come together quickly. As a bonus I have a working domain core to leverage for steps after the mvp.
connectsnk 4 hours ago [-]
Is there any other framework which can claim that it compares well to Ruby on Rails speed of development? I.e. conventions over configurations? Asking as I don’t want to learn ruby
tomca32 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve been asking this question for a while since I love Rails but I don’t like Ruby that much.
I think only Django comes close, although I haven’t tried it, but I dislike Python much more than Ruby.
There are always attempts in every language to replicate the convention over configuration and batteries included approach of Rails, but they all lose steam pretty quickly.
I just don’t think there is an alternative to Rails. It’s a giant project that is actively developed for over 2 decades now.
This was my first impression too but I wasn't sure it covered the OPs convention over configuration stipulation.
Elixir/Phoenix is far and away my favorite framework to build with, but it does leave some things up to the user in a way that Rails doesn't, eg: there is no automatic `class -> table` mapping, or automatically inferring what partial or form names to use by a variables name.
In my mind, this is not a downside and there are still idiomatic ways to write Phoenix code, but just to outline some philosophical differences I guess. In the end I much prefer it because everything's a bit more explicit and flexible when I want it.
I think Phoenix also expects read documentation around OTP if you want to really achieve high leverage. This is worth it, and you can sort of drip feed yourself by starting with Phoenix, recognising that Phoenix primitives [sic] are actually Elixir primitives are actually just OTP primitives and you end up with some pretty good examples of how OTP works in a system you're already familiar with.
I highly recommend checking out Elixir & Phoenix.
wtsnz 2 hours ago [-]
Elixir + Phoenix is amazing. It's one self-contained stack. Just Elixir processes (and Postgres) which takes care of everything other ecosystems farm out to extra services. Background jobs, real-time channels, and even hot-code deployments run natively within the same BEAM runtime.
Working with this with a small team with one simple stack is a breath of fresh air in today's world.
SchwKatze 2 hours ago [-]
In Rust we have loco[1], that aims to be a Rails for Rust. I personally have never built anything serious with it, but all the toys projects were pretty enjoyable.
In elixir -> phoenix,
python -> django,
php -> laravel.
Any other ones are gonna be a little niche but from what I can tell these four (with rails) have the most large and active communities atm.
gregatragenet3 4 hours ago [-]
I used to code ruby. Now in python land and am using flask. Theres conventions but no scaffolding. Ai code tools make the scaffolding feel redundant anyway.
eloisius 30 minutes ago [-]
Coming from Ruby, Flask is much more of a Sinatra than a Rails. It’s very batteries-not-included. You basically just get routing out of the box. DB ORM, forms, auth, mail, background task, etc. are all DIY. That said, there are high quality packages to do all of those things within the ecosystem and I really like that I don’t feel like I have so much unused bloat in the framework when I’m making a small service.
kaeland 4 hours ago [-]
Possibly Laravel, but then you’d have to learn PHP! :D
All jokes aside, having worked in both languages and frameworks, I’ve enjoyed the Dev experience in either option.
Grateful for both dev communities as well.
rorylaitila 3 hours ago [-]
It's niche, but check out https://www.boxlang.io/ and https://www.lucee.org/ on the JVM. They're rock solid runtimes. I single handedly manage multiple production applications going on 10+ years. They essentially never break, never need major maintenance. Backwards compatibility is great. The runtimes are very batteries included in terms of backend web development.
wavemode 3 hours ago [-]
Django is more or less Python's equivalent of Rails. Its admin panel is nice, especially for a solo developer trying to manage something they built in a weekend.
ipsod 48 minutes ago [-]
Django's admin is great. I think iommi is better for a lot of projects.
With admin, you basically just write models, and the entire rest of your app is free. Not quite, but, not far off.
mmillin 3 hours ago [-]
I’m curious if .NET can compare here, though I have limited experience with rails or ASP.NET both seem to give you a lot to work with. Though the overlap of rails devs with .NET devs seems minimal.
sanex 1 hours ago [-]
I learned to code professionally in Ruby but wrote C# .Net for almost 10 years. I've probably forgotten more about .Net than I ever learned about Ruby at this point so take what I say with a grain of salt.
.Net has tons of configuration and boilerplate so I can't say that it's exactly the same in that sense, but the more meta theme is that just as there is a Rails way to do things, there is a Microsoft way to do things. Unlike Java where you're relying on lots of third party packages that while well maintained, aren't owned by the same company that does the language, framework, ORM, database, cloud provider, IDE and so on. Having a solid well documented default option that will work for 99% of use cases takes a lot of the load of decision making off your shoulders and also means you'll have plenty of solid documentation and examples you can follow. I've been in JVM land for the past couple years and it just can't compare.
I know Java people will come fight with me after this but I just don't think they know any better.
dullcrisp 3 minutes ago [-]
I think the Java people would say that if you want one way to do things, go do it the Microsoft way :)
jayd16 1 hours ago [-]
Asp.net core is actually pretty simple to stand up and bang something out. Stick to the Microsoft docs and most patterns are handled.
I can't really say how the web UI side holds up to alternatives, tho.
iambateman 2 hours ago [-]
If we raced, me driving Laravel and another dev driving Rails, we would be neck and neck in terms of speed and quality.
2 hours ago [-]
j45 3 hours ago [-]
I have heard Laravel is shockingly complete and most others will pale in comparison to in terms of out of the box speed to first feature and the full CI/CD setup for most any kind of product.
Speed of iteration rules above all.
VWWHFSfQ 4 hours ago [-]
Django is the closest I can think of. Many unicorns built on Django.
Both Rails and Django are horribly slow though, so once you get to some critical scale you gotta start doing some real weird stuff like Instagram did with turning off Python's GC [1], etc.
Regarding the slowness, I think it's super important when working with slow stuff like Django to have good SLOs in your head.
"Home page should load under 2 seconds at P95", "reports should load under 10 seconds at P99", "this background task should take under 30 seconds at P99".
Having these targets (and, frankly, remembering in the B2B space is that the status quo is _so slow_) can let you set performance objectives without chasing milliseconds that you don't need to.
Django has a lot of intrinsic slowness to it, "easy" DB access patterns often lead to heavy messes, but if at the end of the day most customers are getting served under some benchmark you can reap the advantages of the tooling without sweating perf too much.
And when you set these SLOs, you can then push for even tighter ones as you figure out your problem space!
In the B2B space companies get away with _so much_ sluggish behavior, if you're better than the median that's already improving things.
danpalmer 46 minutes ago [-]
My previous company had a sizeable Django monolith and did e-commerce stuff which is fairly latency sensitive. Used well, Django was perfectly capable of hitting 150ms per page which was fine for us. Some optimised pages were under 100ms.
Things we did: careful about N+1 queries, caching where obvious, API calls/emails/etc running in background queues.
Things we didn’t do: use a fast templating language (we used Django’s built in one and it was often our bottleneck), removing all database queries (we just had Postgres <2ms latency away), renormalising data (we were highly relational for most things).
Django is perfectly performant enough for almost all use cases, and insanely fast to develop with.
jamauro 4 hours ago [-]
Phoenix or Meteor.js
4 hours ago [-]
xutopia 2 hours ago [-]
I'm currently building an application to launch it soonish. I'm using Rails and doing everything myself (save for the design of the logo, and some input from a friend on UX).
What's more is that I'm building mobile applications using Hotwire Native. I'm a solo developer building 2 mobile apps(iOS and Android), supported by a fully functional web application and done with vanilla Rails with Hotwire Native.
I'm surprised how well Rails ecosystem is suited to do everything nowadays.
isaachinman 17 minutes ago [-]
What made you choose Hotwire over Capacitor?
AstroBen 1 hours ago [-]
I just wish Ruby had something with the widespread adoption of TypeScript. Once a project gets large enough it's really painful not having types
Sorbet and RBS are okay but they don't really compare
sota_pop 51 minutes ago [-]
The way I describe language types to non-coders inquiring about language selection for a given project is simply “scale matters”… dynamic types provide flexibility at small scale, but can very easily result in chaos at a large scale. Conversely, the structure of static types can feel onerous and restrictive at small scale, but provide robustness and structure at large scale.
xutopia 1 hours ago [-]
I see what you mean but I have never found it to be an issue even in large codebases. Sorbet and RBS have been problematic. Lots of development slows down with these solutions. I wished it had something baked into the language as well but I'm happy without... just following conventions alone has worked really well for me.
I worked with Rails and Phoenix in their early days and got plenty of value from each. If you're building a traditional web 2 app, look no further...similar to choosing Postgres, start there until you have really good reason to venture off.
Without taking away anything from these frameworks and as someone that spent over 10 years building app frameworks, sometimes it's not what I want.
I'm using Clojure for my current problem space which would stymy me if I tried to use Rails or Phoenix. I spent the past 4 months doing product/domain "shaping". There are no web pages yet..mostly pure server side domain and API calls for data gathering. After this exploration I now have several working subsystems and have figured out the pathway to the mvp which will come together quickly. As a bonus I have a working domain core to leverage for steps after the mvp.
There are always attempts in every language to replicate the convention over configuration and batteries included approach of Rails, but they all lose steam pretty quickly.
I just don’t think there is an alternative to Rails. It’s a giant project that is actively developed for over 2 decades now.
Elixir/Phoenix is far and away my favorite framework to build with, but it does leave some things up to the user in a way that Rails doesn't, eg: there is no automatic `class -> table` mapping, or automatically inferring what partial or form names to use by a variables name.
In my mind, this is not a downside and there are still idiomatic ways to write Phoenix code, but just to outline some philosophical differences I guess. In the end I much prefer it because everything's a bit more explicit and flexible when I want it.
I think Phoenix also expects read documentation around OTP if you want to really achieve high leverage. This is worth it, and you can sort of drip feed yourself by starting with Phoenix, recognising that Phoenix primitives [sic] are actually Elixir primitives are actually just OTP primitives and you end up with some pretty good examples of how OTP works in a system you're already familiar with.
I highly recommend checking out Elixir & Phoenix.
Working with this with a small team with one simple stack is a breath of fresh air in today's world.
1- https://loco.rs
Any other ones are gonna be a little niche but from what I can tell these four (with rails) have the most large and active communities atm.
All jokes aside, having worked in both languages and frameworks, I’ve enjoyed the Dev experience in either option.
Grateful for both dev communities as well.
With admin, you basically just write models, and the entire rest of your app is free. Not quite, but, not far off.
.Net has tons of configuration and boilerplate so I can't say that it's exactly the same in that sense, but the more meta theme is that just as there is a Rails way to do things, there is a Microsoft way to do things. Unlike Java where you're relying on lots of third party packages that while well maintained, aren't owned by the same company that does the language, framework, ORM, database, cloud provider, IDE and so on. Having a solid well documented default option that will work for 99% of use cases takes a lot of the load of decision making off your shoulders and also means you'll have plenty of solid documentation and examples you can follow. I've been in JVM land for the past couple years and it just can't compare.
I know Java people will come fight with me after this but I just don't think they know any better.
I can't really say how the web UI side holds up to alternatives, tho.
Speed of iteration rules above all.
Both Rails and Django are horribly slow though, so once you get to some critical scale you gotta start doing some real weird stuff like Instagram did with turning off Python's GC [1], etc.
[1] https://instagram-engineering.com/copy-on-write-friendly-pyt...
"Home page should load under 2 seconds at P95", "reports should load under 10 seconds at P99", "this background task should take under 30 seconds at P99".
Having these targets (and, frankly, remembering in the B2B space is that the status quo is _so slow_) can let you set performance objectives without chasing milliseconds that you don't need to.
Django has a lot of intrinsic slowness to it, "easy" DB access patterns often lead to heavy messes, but if at the end of the day most customers are getting served under some benchmark you can reap the advantages of the tooling without sweating perf too much.
And when you set these SLOs, you can then push for even tighter ones as you figure out your problem space!
In the B2B space companies get away with _so much_ sluggish behavior, if you're better than the median that's already improving things.
Things we did: careful about N+1 queries, caching where obvious, API calls/emails/etc running in background queues.
Things we didn’t do: use a fast templating language (we used Django’s built in one and it was often our bottleneck), removing all database queries (we just had Postgres <2ms latency away), renormalising data (we were highly relational for most things).
Django is perfectly performant enough for almost all use cases, and insanely fast to develop with.
What's more is that I'm building mobile applications using Hotwire Native. I'm a solo developer building 2 mobile apps(iOS and Android), supported by a fully functional web application and done with vanilla Rails with Hotwire Native.
I'm surprised how well Rails ecosystem is suited to do everything nowadays.
Sorbet and RBS are okay but they don't really compare
No depdancies. Frontend react as well as SSR included as jsx. Faster than fastify. JS/ES/TS runtime agonstic. Native tsx jsx support.