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Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

You left out Nova, which is also paid.

I don't want to come across as "nobody should give Laravel money," to be clear. I'm just observing that Laravel is essentially a commercial open-source enterprise in a way that Rails and Django aren't. Models like this seem to be a bit more common in the PHP world. (e.g., Sensio Labs makes their money by teaching and consulting on Symfony, Laravel LLC makes money from Laravel add-on services, but Basecamp makes money from the SaaS applications they're building on top of Rails and is not trying to monetize Rails itself.)

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Rails very much was a commercial open source enterprise when it started out.

It's just that the enterprise was Basecamp and the other 37 Signals apps. They benefited enormously from the extra eyeballs on their framework, not least during the infamous "hey, we built this massive web framework in part around the incorrect assumption that GET requests don't need to be idempotent and then encouraged everyone to use it" time.

They had no services to sell but they had a keen commercial imperative.

> not least during the infamous "hey, we built this massive web framework in part around the incorrect assumption that GET requests don't need to be idempotent and then encouraged everyone to use it" time.

Tell me more. I remember when Rails was first released but missed that entire saga.

It is so long ago now that I can't even find stuff about it on Google -- 2006 I think?

Basically, well after they'd released the framework they had to change the Rails scaffolding (and I think their own apps) because parts of the scaffolding (CRUD deletes) would use GET to do the action that should only be done as POST. They discovered it about the time link-prefetching was invented ;-)

Basically, browsers were pre-fetching all the clever scaffolded delete URLs and destroying records, seemingly at random.

I was really impressed with Rails at the time but stayed well away from the scaffolded code in production, and I was gobsmacked by the idea that people talking about a clever, opinionated framework that did the right thing and produced magical, clean, elegant code to rescue you from terrible alternatives did not understand that GET requests should be idempotent.

Edit: here is one bit about it:

https://dhh.dk/arc/000455.html

The unearned high-mindedness of this still makes me chuckle.

You're right, thanks! Edited to add Nova (which I think is a fantastic product, and is worth far more than the $199 it costs).

for $199, you'd think Nova would be mobile friendly. Maybe this has changed? When we tried it last year, we were quite shocked it had no responsive design support.

I admit my initial thought looking at Nova was "this is free with Django!", but I'm pretty sure Nova does a lot more. :) (Django's automatic admin interface still had a distinct "state of the art for 2006" vibe the last time I looked, although to be fair it's been a few years.)

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