Currently working on my company's new saas, the main goal is to manage content and user. I'm familiar with the rails framework and how it is easy to code and deploy. The thing is I'm the only dev on the project, and in terms of the tech stack, there is no preference. However, because Node.js is everywhere and there is enough dev on the market, I am stuck between choosing Rails or Node.js. I don't mind implementing Vue.js or React on the frontend, but I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs.
Rails is currently a very mature and feature complete framework.
It's the ideal one if you're the only dev for your project because you get so many things already baked-in the framework that you'd only need to deeply care about specific stuff.
I won't say any NodeJS framework isn't good enough but in my experience with NodeJS frameworks you have to code a lot of the things Rails already provides. There's many people in Twitter and IRL asking for a "Rails for JavaScript" framework.
And you know? In the early stages of any project we have to validate it first with real users/customers. With Rails you can get to production real quick and fast.
I'm going to mention some of the features you get from day 1 when you run rails new app_name:
- File uploading with Active Storage
- Rich text editor with Action Text
- Emailing with Action Mailer
- ORM, migrations, validations with Active Record
- Web sockets with Action Cable
- Internationalization
- Modern frontend stuff with Webpacker
and more.
The JavaScript community is on its moment, growing and gathering more people everyday but the Rails community is also a big one and there's always going to be a Rails developer to hire whenever you're ready to hire someone.
I suggest you to go with Rails because is a good choice, gives you less things to worry about and it's a very good and mature framework.
You are probably referring to ruby on rails for web development and nodejs for building the backend. Nodejs has frameworks such as express and next which not only provides a minimal code to build a backend but also gives the flexibility to try and experiment with the framework choices. For example you can have express framework + Passport for OAuth .... etc. The flexibility and the constant improvement of the language provides a good reason to opt for nodejs. Nodejs uses javascript which makes your code uniform when you are working full stack i.e react in front end and nodejs in backend.
I'm familiar with Nodejs, express and vue, i have worked on a coupled of project with those stacks. my question was mainly towards how can i explain to a group of people (my supervisors) that arent tech savvy why working on rails is good for such product which is small and im the only dev on it. the goal is to dev it using rails api for the backend with a vuejs frontend.
You can tell them by showing the google trends , the manner in which nodejs has taken over ruby on rails over the years. You can show the amount of support that has been gained in the community when nodejs is being used and lastly you can tell them that nodejs is blazing fast due to v8 engine on which it runs.
