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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Now that Rails isn't the cool new thing anymore

But why does that have an impact on what tech you use?

It's a good question and it's really what I'm asking about.

The only web-stuff I've worked on in a commercial settings was a long time ago using Java and Tomcat. At the time, it was the cool new thing. I think that some of the pain points of languages and frameworks from that era are what prompted DHH to develop Rails (I'm specifically thinking about convention-over-configuration and admit I could be totally wrong here).

So today, I probably wouldn't pick Java and Tomcat for a personal project just because I know it won't be as fun and I won't be as productive as I would be with different technology. Has Rails been eclipsed in a similar way?

No.

I’m running a team of developers where we are using Rails as our first-line tool, but we are also committed to using the best tool to solve the jobs at hand. So far, we have only needed to add Lua for a small piece of what we are doing because we can reason about what our logic is supposed to be doing quickly and easily in Rails.

Less than a third of my team were Ruby or Rails developers before joining us, and we are always pushing forward on learning more so that we have a great bucket of tools available as we try to solve our business problems and we hit those things where trying to reason about the problem is difficult in Rails, or where performance matters more than readability and code clarity.

I'll pick Java, SpringMVC, Maven, JUnit+DBUnit, and FlyWay (DB migration) and any appserver (jetty, tomcat, TomEE, glassfish) thrown at me except from the BigCos (WebLogic, WebSphere).

Those tools are pretty close to what Rails give you (notice the View/UI is open for anything... Rails View is slightly nicer as it has better templating capabilities but ... not a deal breaker for me).

It's not sexy, it gets the job done, and I know it'll run for at least 5-7 years with minimum hassle.

Plus it's easy to be productive on Java project...

Even as someone who uses the newer languages/frameworks, I wish I could upvote this statement multiple times:

"It's not sexy, it gets the job done, and I know it'll run for at least 5-7 years with minimum hassle."

Upvoted. I am tired of getting the "uncool old fart" looks every time I propose similar stack. You CAN do cool stuff with established tech plus have a peace of mind that you will not run into any "surprises".

It makes total sense to mitigate risk on a commercial project by going with established (well supported, well understood) technology. No argument. But for a personal toy project where you want to be surprised, would you choose something like Ruby on Rails?

Yeah I got trashed karma wise on a previous comment explaining how I had to port some Ruby apps to Java. I don't even care that much about either technology but just mentioning that I had to port something to Java earned me -4.... seriously.

There's a lot of debates about this. Here's a view by a partner at YCombinator in the context of new company:

http://blog.jaredfriedman.com/2015/09/15/why-i-wouldnt-use-r...

I have a different general philosophy:

https://www.nemil.com/musings/shinyandnew.html

My own bias is to pick the best tool for the job, and not risk hype dictating your decisions. If you're learning for fun and personal learning, that' s great - just realize that you should optimize differently.

For those of us who were stuck with the JVM, fortunately there's now Grails (obviously modeled after Rails). Groovy makes programming for the JVM fun IMO.

I've used Groovy/Grails for a number of web apps, both in commercial settings and side projects. Since I had previously been doing a lot of Java, being able to leverage the existing Java ecosystem and libraries with Rails-like productivity was a huge plus.

I wouldn't say I'm stuck on the JVM, I actually prefer building web apps with Grails.

Grails may have a small community, but it makes Java web development really sexy. And I write 50% of my Grails code with Java. Groovy is ok, but I prefer the excellent IDE support I get with Java.

"Stuck with" was probably not the right wording. Where I started with Grails in an enterprise environment, Rails would have been a non-starter (or at least a much tougher sell) because operationally we were a Java shop. With Grails, though, it's just another WAR to drop in your servlet container, so operations doesn't really care.

Which IDE do you use? I find IntelliJ to have great Groovy support. Also, you can optionally type check Groovy, which helps even more.

I use IntelliJ too, and I use static typing and @CompileStatic all the time. I'm not complaining, just being nitpicky. I don't see the point coding Java style with Groovy. And that is in my opinion Groovy's biggest strength, that a Groovy and Java class can work great together. A class written in Groovy works just like a Java class in Java and a class written in Java works like a Groovy class in Groovy :-) And I'm a big fan of using Groovy when working with JDBC.

You don't need a Rails clone just so you can work on the JVM -- you could use JRuby on Rails.

slightly off-topic: there's plenty of new Java frameworks out there that can be pretty productive and "fun" - mostly the Sinatra-style ones (Spark, etc) and stuff like Activejdbc for ORM. Plus, there's fun languages on the JVM that allow for less verbose code without going dynamic - eg Kotlin or Scala.

This probably sounds pretty stupid, but once Oracle (or was it Sun?) started bundling other software in the installer that I don't want, I was done with that language. Then Oracle started claiming the Java library API was their IP and protected by copyright. Ugh. I'm probably not going to go back to Java again.

Yes it does sound stupid.

1. Server-side uses Linux, installation through command-line

2. Java standard library API owns by Oracle? fine by 99% of the companies out there. I'm just using those libraries.

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