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Comment by bti | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a little off topic... I just started a small project using Angular and Rails, learning both from scratch as I go. I am using Rails as a purely JSON server and handling all the templates in Angular and doing requests over $http. Is it worth using Angular just for the UI niceness and using more of Rails? I need things like authentication and sessions but at its roots it is a single page app. Would any of this new Rails 4 turbolinks stuff help?

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If you want to learn Rails, you should choose a project that will teach you Rails. If all you're going to do with it is serve up JSON, then you're not really going to learn anything and will needlessly overcomplicate your app. Just use something like Sinatra in this case, Sinatra will get out of your way and allow you to focus on the front-end.

Using Angular with Rails is definitely a Good Thing(TM), but you really need a large enough project to justify, something both front- and back-end heavy. My current project is large enough to benefit from both, but unfortunately, I chose jQuery and Sinatra. Feeling the pain, for sure.

There is waaaay more to Rails than the view layer. If 'all you're going to do is serve up JSON', then you'll be using a very large amount of Rails: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api#why-use-rails-for-jso...

Hmm. Thanks for this.

The Rails-API project is here to help! http://github.com/rails-api/rails-api

I don't personally know of anyone using Angular + Turbolinks, so I can't answer that.

Thanks, I'm building Angular.js app and adopting Rails 4 for api backend, Will Rails-API be updated for Rails 4 ?

It should work today. If it does not, it's a bug.

By the way, ActiveModel::Serializers is part of the Rails API project[1], and we'd love some thoughts on how to make it work well with Angular.

1: https://github.com/rails-api/active_model_serializers

The only issue that's been biting me when using ActiveModel::Serializers and AngularJS is that we must manually return the json with the root: false option set, otherwise the AngularJS $resource provider doesn't work correctly.

If it helps you can make that the default for all your serializers, by doing something like this in an initializer:

    ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_model_serializers) do
      ActiveModel::ArraySerializer.root = false
      ActiveModel::Serializer.root = false
    end

Looks like it already is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5940484

Wow that looks great. Are there any benchmarks as to how much faster it is compared to a vanilla Rails app?

It's difficult to benchmark, to be honest: Rails apps depend on so many things, there are too many variables. I'd love to hear from some people who have tried it in their apps though!

I'm more interested in it as a place to explore best practices and work on useful things around names, than the speed aspects.

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