Hacker News Reader

Comment by designium | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is trying to compare what it takes to create an MVP web-app with all modern features versus creating it in the JS ecosystem.

Also, Rails is well known to have Convention over Configuration. That helps to set up and maintain a project since everybody has to follow the same pattern. The cons is that you lose flexibility from the architecture perspective. But in Rails, you have ways to overcome that easily.

I think Rails lost popularity when the front-end JS framework movement started. Rails didn't have a response to that; people had to create the Rails app, remove the Views and use a JS framework to create the one-page app experience.

Now, if you are already spending that much time using JS for the front-end, why not use JS for the backend? But then things got too complex in the JS due to the lack of conventions.

View on HN

I think in reality the JS ecosystem is fat with choice for convention over configuration style frameworks. Projects such as Nest, Sails and Adonis leave nothing on the table compared to Rails. The problem is a lot of programmers would rather loosely cobble something together with express than to stick to rigid standards. That's what I think actually leads to the problem of inane NodeJS codebases people always complain about, it's cultural rather than technical. Perhaps the accessibility and popularity of JavaScript leads to a much larger crowd of inexperienced programmers.

My hunch is that most JS developers just aren't aware of these frameworks. A lot of people in this thread are mixing up Next.js and NestJS, and NestJS is the most popular out of the three you mentioned. Sure it has a lot of stars on Github (44k), but even I had forgotten I had starred it.

Couldn't have said it better myself!

A lot of JS tooling that popped up in the last 10 years is amazing. The React way of building a UI makes a lot of sense to me and I like it way more than HTML + JS combo from the old days. Also, using JS for both frontend and backend is convenient and great for hiring teams.

But, after years of making SPAs, it gets tiring to assemble all of the pieces from scratch every time. I don't want to configure things, I want to build my ideas.

So use a JS framework?

I've seen this myself on the .NET side. Someone will create an MVC application then rip all the views out and tag everything with a decorator that turns those controller endpoints into API endpoints, then slap Angular or React on top of that. More recently I've seen Web APIs created which explicitly lack any front end integration (this is what we do at $DAYJOB when .NET makes sense).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com