Which areas of Rails do you think need improvements?

[AstonJ]

How can Rails be better in your opinion?

[jcrben]

@AstonJ I’m looking at what to use as the backend for my next single-page app (which will probably use Ember). Rails is attractive due to the community and language, but I’m not satisfied with the conventional monolithic folder structure organized by type of file rather than feature or functionality. My other top choice is Django, which actually is organized by feature.

It is quite possible to go another way and I’ve got plenty of guidance in the form of blog posts, but even then I’d rather not fight convention. Ember explicitly accounts for a by-feature top-level folder structure (‘pods’), and I wish Rails had the same approach.

[kofno]

Since this topic has been revived, I feel like globally scoped helpers are a mess. The cells gem looks like an interesting approach to this, though I haven’t tried it yet.

[kofno]

While we’re at it, I don’t care for the asset pipeline. After using phoenix, I’d really like to have brunch.io in rails.

[AstonJ]

@jcrben

@AstonJ I’m looking at what to use as the backend for my next single-page app (which will probably use Ember). Rails is attractive due to the community and language, but I’m not satisfied with the conventional monolithic folder structure organized by type of file rather than feature or functionality. My other top choice is Django, which actually is organized by feature.

It is quite possible to go another way and I’ve got plenty of guidance in the form of blog posts, but even then I’d rather not fight convention. Ember explicitly accounts for a by-feature top-level folder structure (‘pods’), and I wish Rails had the same approach.

Have you looked at the Volt framework? It splits the app into components and is more of an MVVC framework. I’d prefer that over Django and you wouldn’t need to use Ember either

[danielpclark]

@AstonJ

Have you looked at the Volt framework? It splits the app into components and is more of an MVVC framework. I’d prefer that over Django and you wouldn’t need to use Ember either

Unfortunately Volt development is dead at the moment.

Ryan Stout @ryanstout Apr 13 18:24
@/all Hello Volt community. As you may or may not be aware, I’ve been unable to put much time into volt lately. While I keep hoping I’ll find more time, my day job project has been growing quickly and demanding most of my time. I was hoping to find a company willing to sponsorship volt development. While I did have a few companies interested, it never worked out, so for now I need to keep devoting time to my day job. I hate to see the community’s hard work and Volt’s potential go to waste. If anyone is interested in taking over as the lead volt developer, please PM me on here. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far, sorry I can’t contribute right now in a larger capacity. Years ago I would have just quit everything and lived on a friends couch, but now I have a wife and 3 kids, so that changes things Again, thanks to everyone involved. Please chat with me if you are interested. Thanks!

And @AstonJ I happen to really like Django. If only it could be written in Ruby it would be better

[danielpclark]

I would really like Rails to change Arel from being a private API to a public one. That way they’d stop changing it so much between Rails minor verions.

[AstonJ]

Ah I missed that about Volt, that’s a shame as it was promising. I think many people became interested in Phoenix (and somewhat disinterested in Opal) and so interest in Volt waned.

Speaking of Phoenix, forget Django and check out Phoenix

[danielpclark]

@AstonJ

Speaking of Phoenix, forget Django and check out Phoenix

But Phoenix doesn’t work with a language that starts with “Ru”. How can I even consider it?

[AstonJ]

Dude didn’t you get the memo! Elixir is the child of Erlang and Ruby - and it wasn’t an accident

Many people feel Phoenix is the spiritual successor of Rails…

I think you should forget Rust and learn Elixir instead

[danielpclark]

@AstonJ

I think you should forget Rust and learn Elixir instead

Thems fighten words

[AstonJ]

Critical post about Rails - do you share his concerns/rants?

http://solnic.eu/2016/05/22/my-time-with-rails-is-up.html

[PikachuEXE]

I just use it since it’s hard to move away
But I still try to use less from it (unless no better alternatives)

It’s good for learning but not good for every web app development (not every aspect at least)

As someone said: “Use it, but don’t marry it”

[danielpclark]

@AstonJ

do you share his concerns/rants?

Nope. Still learning new things with Rails (new discoveries). I rather enjoy Rails.

[kofno]

Not really. There are days when I wish Ruby was faster and had a better story around nil handling. I just don’t use the stuff in Rails that I don’t like.

[jcrben]

I ended up finding good guides on how to structure a large-scale Rails app in a maintainable way. I had already been aware of a modular Ruby framework, Hanami. But I specifically am drawn to Rails due to its large community and ecosystem. If I wanted to do an adventurous project, I’d probably use Elixir or Phoenix or something.

It seems that Enrico Teotti and Stephen Hageman from Pivol are experts in modular Rails. See Component-Based Rails Applications Resources for example. Also see Enrico’s component-based-rails-architecture posts.

[AstonJ]

This is a great response to Solnic’s blog post:

Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room | AkitaOnRails.com

[kofno]

I’ve built rails apps in the components based approach before. It works pretty well, but, as with anything, pros and cons.

When you take that approach, you have to make sure that are paying the upkeep on each component. The CI process has to test each component independently, for example. And there’s some double entry you have to do between gemspecs and Gemfiles for any component you are maintaining on the file path.