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Rails vs Node - Help me Decide


Rails, is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and for web pages. Node.Js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.

In this post, we’ll objectively look at a few of their differences, strengths and weaknesses to help you decide which, and when to use these technologies.

Community Support

Node The Node.Js community is broad, inclusive, and excited to enable as many users to contribute in whatever way they can. It is worthy to note that Node.Js has a package manager npm which has the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world. Node.Js also enjoys the support of the wider JavaScript community network.

As a way of keeping developers in sync, Node.Js has a committee that is directly in charge of global outward-facing community outreach efforts. They also organize local and international meetups and conferences to bring developers together. Node has not been around as much as the likes of Rails and Django, however, it is gaining steady popularity and usage. So far it has received, 54.3k stars, 11.7k repo forks with 2.1k contributions on Github.

nodejs_vs_rails-node-github.png

Community Support

Rails Rails have been in existence way longer than Node.Js hence, it has a very broad community support. The vast number of Plugins and Ruby Gems available for Rails has made it one of the most supported web framework available. Given that Rails has been around for a long time, it has a lot of people actively using and contributing. You can get involved with the community online on the Ruby on Rails: Talk mailing list, the Ruby on Rails StackOverflow Q&A tag, or the #rubyonrails IRC channel on Freenode.

As a way of keeping the community spirit high and bringing members together, they also do a yearly RailsConf conference for people to meet and share in real life. So far, Rails has received 41.1k stars, 16.6k repo forks with 3.6k contributions on Github.

nodejs_vs_rails-rails-github.png

Pros and Cons

Now, let’s take a look at a few strengths and weaknesses of these technologies and hopefully help you decide which will best suit your needs.

Node.js Pros and Cons

The Pros:

High Market Demand At this time, Node.js is on the cutting edge of web development, and the excitement for Rails has really gone down. More companies are hiring JS developers than any other language. This makes Node almost the most in-demand back-end solution right now. Data from Indeed shows that there 9.4K job postings for Node and 3.3K postings for Rails. TechMagic also shows a graph of Node.Js job trends vs that of Rails.

Comprehensive Node.JS covers everything from HTTP server to templating engine etc. Rails rely on something like Nginx or Apache with mod_rails to work. Moreso, it has the same language on both the client and server side making it even more lucrative and comprehensive. Plesk did a comparison post that further showcases this as well as Codeburst Node.js Cons.

High Performance Because of the fantastic npm modules available to Node.js, and the Chrome’s v8 JavaScript engine, it is vigorously fast. When performance is a factor, Node.js performance better than Rails, more like better than any other web framework as it runs on the Google JavaScript engine which is lightning fast. Moreso, half of the respondents of Node.js 2017 User Survey noticed improved application performance in comparison to other solutions. Also, LinkedIn replaced their back-end mobile infrastructure built on Ruby on Rails with Node.Js some time ago for performance and scalability reasons.

Scalability Because Node is asynchronous and runs on a single thread, it has been found by many companies to be very scalable. As a matter of fact, companies like Twitters new web stack is built on Node.js.

The Cons:

Single CPU Node.Js is bound to a single CPU, and as a result, it is not suitable for processor intensive tasks according to this recent findings on Codeburst.

Unending Frameworks Just like JavaScript, Node.js has tons of frameworks and there’s still more coming every day. This can get a little weary for developers as they will have to constantly learn the new frameworks to stay up to par. According to Pramod on Codeburst, Node.js remains inconsistent with it’s changing API’s but might change for good in time.

Not so backward compatible Because of the inconsistency in Node.Js API’s, it keeps changing at frequent intervals. As a result, it is often not very backward compatible. A statement on the release website just showed that they have made minor changes to support backward-compatibility.

Asynchronous Node is asynchronous. Hence, you’re going to run into a lot of callback functions that can potentially pile up to what is called a callback hell. However, the Node.js community has devised a few ways to prevent this on CypherTrick.

Rails Pros and Cons

The Pros: Consistency Rails is very consistent in it’s development structure given that it follows the MVC pattern. As a result, most, if not all Rails applications will look the same with regards to core files and application structure. According to Mical on NetGuru, Rails still maintain one of the best industry standards.

Development efficiency Rails has an efficient system of modules and a package manager that makes it super easy. It also has tons of gems that could serve for pretty much any purpose. This in turn speeds up development time and increases productivity.

Ease of migration Rails is also one of the very few web frameworks that has a really good database migration functionality. Creating, editing and updating tables and columns in databases can be done directly on Rails without having to change settings on the database manually.

Vibrant community According to Micals RoR community post, Rails has an amazing community of developers who are constantly working to improve Rails by way of addition of new functionalities, creation of guides, attending to issues, etc.

The Cons: Performance One of the major pitfalls of Rails is that it is relatively slow. Both the runtime speed and the boot time speed are all slow as compared to that of their alternatives Node.js and GoLang. As a result, LinkedIn replaced their back-end mobile infrastructure built on Ruby on Rails with Node.Js some time ago for performance and scalability reasons.

Errors are expensive to fix If you’re able to be thorough and pay attention to all the small details during development, Rails will definitely be your helpful friend. However, if you make a wrong architecture decision during development, it could turn into a very expensive ordeal. Rails structural deficiencies are hard to fix because Rails is an open framework, where all components are tightly coupled and depend on each other. For instance, too much reliance on ActiveRecord makes an application logic tightly coupled with database models, which leads to maintainability problems in the long run.

Scaling Rails has been understood to have major scaling issues for big projects. As much as it works well for small applications, once capacity grows and you have need for scaling, it gets generally difficult with Rails. Company’s like Twitter has had to move away from Rails at some point when they faced a major scaling issue.

Strict nature Rails is a very opinionated framework as some will say. It forces you to follow a particular way. Some do see it as a good thing but we understand that flexibility is important not just for the project but for the developers creative skill.

Learning curve

Rails learning curve Rails follows the MVC structure, this makes it easier to understand for developers who are already familiar with the MVC framework. It however makes it a bit more difficult for non MVC experienced developers when trying to quickly get started on Rails. Moreso, it is vast with tons of gems and libraries, it takes quiet some time to get experienced with the framework given the number of tools you’ll need to get familiar with.

Node.Js learning curve Node runs on JavaScript, which according to BusinessInsider is the most popular and in demand language in the world. This alone makes it pretty much easy to use given the fact that almost every developer (even non JavaScript developers) are in certain ways very familiar with JavaScript syntax and concepts. However, it is worthy to note that Node itself is different from JavaScript, but being that it was built with JavaScript, JavaScript developers use it to maintain stack consistency. This however, means that developers coming from non JavaScript backgrounds like (Java, C#, PHP etc) will have to first understand JavaScript in order to efficiently use Node.

Getting started

Getting started with Rails:

  • Step1: Download and install Ruby and SQLite3
  • Step2: Confirm installation by running this command:
    $ ruby -v
    // this should print a value like this
    // ruby 2.3.1p112

Rails require Ruby version 2.2.2 or later.

  • Step3: If you are working on Windows, you should also install the Ruby Installer Development Kit.
  • Step4: Confirm SQLite3 version by running this command:
    $ sqlite3 --version 
  • Step5: Install Rails using the gem installation command:
    $ gem install rails
  • Step6: Verify Rails installation by running this command:
    $ rails --version
  • Step7: Create a new Rails app, switch to it’s folder and start the server:
    //create a new app "newProject"
    $ rails new newProject
    // swicth to the project folder
    $ cd newProject
    // start the server
    $ bin/rails server

Now open a browser window and navigate to localhost:3000. You should see the Rails default information page:

nodejs_vs_rails-rails_welcome.png

Getting started with Node.Js:

  • Step1: Download and install Node
  • Step2: Confirm Node version:
    $ node -v
  • Step3: Create new Node project, switch to the project folder and open it up in VSCode:
    // create project folder
    $ mkdir newProject
    // switch into the project folder
    $ cd newProject
    // initialize a Node project in it
    $ npm init -y
    // ... next open up the project folder in your editor ... //
    $ code .
  • Step4: Create an app.js file in the project root directory and update it with the code:
    const http = require('http');
    const hostname = '127.0.0.1';
    const port = 3000;

    const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
      res.statusCode = 200;
      res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
      res.end('Hello World\n');
    });
    server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
      console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
    });
  • Step5: Run the Node app:
    $ node app.js

Now visit localhost:3000 and you will see a message 'Hello Node!!' with this output:

nodejs_vs_rails-Node.PNG

Performance

Performance is a major issue for the Ruby on Rails community. Given that the framework is heavy and embodies a large number of mixins and gems that further contributes to the slow runtime and boot time of Rails applications. As compared with the likes of Node.Js, GoLang and Python, they all outperform Rails given that it has the lowest runtime and boot time speed.

That said, Rails has been making consistent improvements to increase performance. This has kept all the big companies running on Rails afloat without issues till date. On the 16th of September 2018, Daniel J Colson posted on the Rails blog about some major performance improvements some of which are:

  1. Do less work and use less memory - This successfully replaced 1682 system calls with just 14.
  2. Use faster globs for template resolving - This made file storage 1.58% faster, stopped the allocation of arrays on no args etc.

You can also check out the full list of the most recent changes on their Github repo.

Node on the other hand is a JavaScript runtime powered by Chrome v8 JavaScript engine which makes it lightning fast. As a result, Node has one of the fastest runtime and boot time speed. Node.Js also owes its fast performance to the fact that it is single-threaded and asynchronous. This means that every I/O operation doesn’t block other operations. Hence, you can read files, send mails, query the database, etc all at the same time.

Companies and individuals have found their applications to be twice and thrice faster with Node than with other conventional frameworks. However, given that it is single threaded, performance suffers a bit of a downfall during heavy CPU intensive tasks.

nodejs_vs_rails-benchmark.png

As can be seen from the table above, Rails has the slowest runtime when compared with the likes of Java and JavaScript.

Community Impact Numbers

These technology are both widely used by developers around the world. We’ll curate the ratings given by users on different platforms as at the time of writing to help you understand how other developers see them:

Platform specific metrics:

Framework Hackernews Pts Reddit Pts StackOverflow Qs Github Stars Stack Jobs
Node 3.86K 3.4K 246K 54.3k 5.21K
Rails 2.37K 1.29K 298K 41.1K 3.95K

According to this Stackshare ratings, 2178 companies on their platform use Rails including twitter, AirBnb and Codecademy. It also integrates with over 39 tools. The same ratings puts Node.Js on 3404 companies and 93 tools.

Conclusion

Node.Js is perfect for web apps, mobile apps, real-time applications (instant messaging, live chat), online gaming apps, e-commerce transaction software, and much more. It's also a good choice if you're dealing with microservice architecture, which can lay the foundation for advanced systems – bear in mind that apps like Netflix or Uber were built using Node.Js.

Rails is definitely one of the best web development frameworks to consider for your next project. With Rails, you can do pretty much the same as with other good frameworks. The excellent community, a quality code base, the sheer size of the module database, and the maintainability of Rails applications made it the preferred choice for such successful projects as Airbnb, GitHub, BaseCamp, Zendesk, and Bloomberg. However, the devil is in the detail. Rails is surely a good choice if your project has tight deadlines and budget requirements.

Node.js vs Rails: What are the differences?

Node.js: A platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices; Rails: Web development that doesn't hurt. Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Node.js and Rails can be categorized as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Npm", "Javascript" and "Great libraries" are the key factors why developers consider Node.js; whereas "Rapid development", "Great gems" and "Great community" are the primary reasons why Rails is favored.

Node.js and Rails are both open source tools. Rails with 43.6K GitHub stars and 17.5K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Node.js with 35.5K GitHub stars and 7.78K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Node.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 4102 company stacks & 4028 developers stacks; compared to Rails, which is listed in 2321 company stacks and 796 developer stacks.

Advice on Node.js and Rails
Needs advice
on
Next.jsNext.jsNode.jsNode.js
and
Vue.jsVue.js

As a newbie, trying to code an Avatar AI app from scratch - (I'm familiar with setting up the backend APIs on Flask), but blocked on choosing the frontend. Which of these JavaScript frameworks are preferred for development with Flask. Also, are there any UI tools / low-code tools which make development easy?

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Replies (1)
Recommends

I don't say that is preferred, but I think Vue.js is friendly for those having first contact with this kind of technology, also I would recommend checking Quasar framework (vue.js based).

Quasar introduction: https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar

Pure Vuejs (Free) 27min: https://vueschool.io/courses/vuejs-fundamentals

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Needs advice
on
Next.jsNext.js
and
Node.jsNode.js

Hello, I'm trying to build an auction app with solidity and React but I need some server to handle data and internal logic and I don't know what tool to use for the backend for these reasons:

  1. when just using react and solidity it's not fast.
  2. when using Django and web3py, I can't transfer money with Metamask.

I've heard about Next.js and Node.js as the backend but I cant decide. I would appreciate any help.

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Replies (1)
Justin Rice
DevOps Engineer at Indigo AG · | 5 upvotes · 25.8K views
Recommends

The real question here is: "What is the best way to deploy a decentralized application with a React front-end."

Building a decentralized application and integrating things such as Metamask require you to write smart contracts. This process is language agnostic as long as the smart contract is written and deployed to the chosen blockchain correctly.

Using classic Full-Stack HTTP Application frameworks like Django will no longer work because when we create something with Django, the server is centralized, defeating the purpose of the Blockchain architecture.

That being said, now the question is, what programming language do you want to use to deploy this decentralized application? - https://eth-brownie.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ - is a Python framework for writing smart contracts.

As you have already learned and built with React, you might be better off sticking with the same runtime. NodeJS does have frameworks for deploying decentralized applications called the truffle suite: https://trufflesuite.com/.

This is a whole set of tools for writing decentralized applications using JavaScript and TypeScript.

Hope this helps.

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Bogdan Pop
Needs advice
on
.NET.NETNode.jsNode.js
and
SpringSpring

Hello, I am trying to learn a backend framework besides Node.js. I am not sure what to pick between ASP.NET Core (C#) and Spring Boot (Java). Any advice, any suggestion is highly appreciated. I am planning to build only Web APIs (no desktop applications or something like that). One thing to mention is that I have no experience in Java or C#. I am trying to learn one of those 2 and stick to it.

UPDATE: The project I am trying to build is a SaaS using microservices that supports multi tenancy.

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Replies (3)
Dominik Liebler
Lead Software Engineer · | 9 upvotes · 60.7K views
Recommends

I'd recommend to learn Spring as it is very widespread in the industry and provides a lot of easy integration into most of the common backend tech stacks. Rather than learning Java you could look into Kotlin. It's a very consistent, stable and well-thought language in my opinion and not as verbose as Java. Many problems can be solved with Kotlin in a clear and elegant way while also always having the option to use data structures and libs in JVM. It is also has a very good support in Spring.

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Recommends

Why not pick Django or Flask (both Python)

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Lionel Cawood
Technical Team Lead at inTime Agile Logistics · | 3 upvotes · 31.1K views
Recommends

I have worked in a Spring environment for many years and I still love working with it. Super quick to get a base application running and get coding, thanks to Spring Boot's easy and straight forward integration with Tomcat. However, I will try and answer this question from another perspective: look at topics such as popularity of the language, average statistics on community contribution to their repositories and hiring availability from companies. If you are going down the API route for backend, leverege on your experience in the Node world by looking into ExpressJS (or even NestJS). The JavaScript world is really excellerating at a lightning speed, and I could recommend exploring those worlds a bit more, should it be a comfort level for you. However, my biased answer is tryout Java, followed by Spring afterwards. No disrespect to any .NET developers out there, as there are a few topics in there which are fantastically implemented.

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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoPHPPHP
and
RailsRails

I'm really interested in building minimalistic web products with extra stuff like Stripe, MongoDB, solidity, WebAssembly and three.js.

Want to choose my backend lang but am unable to choose, my requirement is:

  • fast dev
  • minimal
  • easy to learn
  • good for saas
  • huge community
  • scalable
  • fast and interactive
  • good job market (not important)
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Replies (1)
Christian Maersk
CEO/Full-stack developer at QUARY Design ApS · | 6 upvotes · 39.9K views

If you want an ’easy-to-learn’ and ‘fast dev’ environment I would go with React.js, Node.js, and Firebase. This is probably one of the easiest tech stacks to develop and offers great scalability without creating a complicated database structure. Furthermore, it’s almost hard to develop a react application that isn’t lightning fast.

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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoLaravelLaravel
and
RailsRails

I am wondering which language would you guys suggest learning if productivity & "future-proofing" is the focus?

I have now 2 years of experience with React Native & Firebase and 3 years of experience with Next.js and ExpressJS. As I like the idea of separating backend & frontend I think as a solo developer the MVC approach will get you way further and overall I started second guessing the whole js ecosystem and its quality.

What I am currently considering the most is Django, even if I am giving up major productivity I think the opportunities Python offers with AI/ML & scrapping are way superior then Rails. I would like to know how much productivity would get lost by deciding on Django.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
DjangoDjangoPythonPython

Python is simple to read. Easy to use and import libraries. It is widely used in many different application domains. It is very easy to learn compared to other languages.

Considering your background is in front end technology; why not try some other language that can help you become more well rounded? Besides, there are always more and more python jobs.

Django is very easy to learn. If you use Django, I recommend the Django-Rest-Framework. This will save you a lot of time. But you need to understand some Python first. I think Python is as simple as: interpreted, dynamically typed language where you use lists and dictionaries a lot.

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Needs advice
on
Node.jsNode.jsPostgreSQLPostgreSQL
and
Spring BootSpring Boot

I've been approached by a business consultant for programming a website + web application for his client, which is a logistics company. The web application will have a tracking system for tracking their GPS enabled fleet (400 tricks).

Kindly advise me which scaleable stack can I use for the back-end. I'm planning to use React for the front-end.

And by back-end, I also include the database. I'm considering PostgreSQL as the database system.

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Replies (3)
Michael Barefield

Spring documentation is great. It makes it easy to learn and teach others when your application continues to grow.

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Damir N
Full-Stack Developer / Team Leader / Solution Architect at WaveAccess · | 5 upvotes · 51.5K views

Spring is a good decision for your needs, but you should build correct microservice architecture for good scaling. Work with database can be easy with ORM (e.g. Hibernate) and migrations (e.g. Liquibase) If you need the best performance and scaling on frontend, you can use Angular or React.

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Yes, all these technologies could be used to solve these type of problems.

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Farrukh Zeeshan
Senior Immigration Consultant · | 6 upvotes · 43.2K views
Needs advice
on
LaravelLaravel
and
Node.jsNode.js

What should be used Node.js or Laravel to create a course search portal having about 50K courses, where users will create a profile and enter their academic credentials, scores, language tests, fee range, subject area, etc, and the system will filter and suggest courses meeting the entry requirements and other criteria. The applicant will then shortlist courses, he should be able to compare courses, apply for courses, upload documents and fill in application details, etc.

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Replies (1)
Peter Forret
Technical Director at Brightfish · | 4 upvotes · 30.6K views
Recommends
on
LaravelLaravel

It's not a fair comparison. Laravel is a PHP web framework, Node is a web server runtime around JS. The question should be either:

  • PHP or Node? => take what you know/can work fast in
  • Laravel or ExpressJS/MeteorJS => take what you know/can work fast in

If it were up to me, I'd choose Laravel because I know it and can work fast in it :-)

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Shanover Saiyed
Software Engineer (Web) · | 4 upvotes · 75.2K views
Needs advice
on
LaravelLaravel
and
Node.jsNode.js

I'm working as a full stack web developer and have been given an opportunity to re-frame the whole website which is written in PHP and JavaScript. Our website is required to be fast, efficient, having good analytics, easy to maintain and rework, and subject to frequent changes. It would be handling some medium size files like resumes, video recordings, etc. So I am thinking of changing the tech stack but confused for which backend to choose for the long run. Which back-end would prove to be better in terms of learning, development, and maintenance?

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js

If it was me, then I would go with node.js because it has huge a number of packages,community,support & good dev experience and learning curve is also not that steep, if coupled with express.js, its gonna be efficient and fast in serving web requests, and if we adopt good design patterns and follow best practices, I guess it will be easy to maintain it as well, and for storing resumes, video rec etc.., I would use assest management tools like cloudinary etc.., rather than storing in db, coz Its gonna be much more faster this way.

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Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js

Nuxt + Fastify + GraphQL + Nginx + Memcache = fast, confortable and a lot of plug-ins. Apache is realy slow :(. Nuxt is great and easy to use. Nginx, Memcache and Fastify it's very efficient. GraphQL require much more from You then REST, but give You flaxibility, order, plugin etc. We tried and don't regret .

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Amir Beheshtaein
Needs advice
on
JavaScriptJavaScriptNext.jsNext.js
and
RailsRails
in

I've inherited a monolithic Rails app for an MVP product. We're planning to slowly migrate away from RoR to build the remaining parts of the app. App requirements: - Video streaming w/ audio - Real time chat - User authentication & roles - Payment system Performance, scalability, and attracting dev talent(s) are important to our team.

I'm considering the microservices approach, SSR + CSR & caching with Next.js (prefer Svelte-kit but it's in beta). I also prefer to keep this a full JS household. What other JavaScript frameworks/libs would you recommend? Keep in mind the existing RoR will not be deprecated. We'll be consuming the APIs and slowly moving away from them until they can safely be deprecated.

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Replies (2)
Paul Keen
Recommends
on
RailsRailsStimulusStimulus

Moving from Rails will reduce development velocity (if you want to have easy support and update the app) and will require more skilled (expensive) developers to support it.

Without previous experience (5+ years) do not suggest moving to node.js. That code will easily become hard to learn and support.

You always can implement microservices with Ruby, but this approach should be considered only after Series-A and when you will have more than 5 developers and dedicated SRE/DevOps.

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Ray Arayilakath
Full-stack Developer && Software Engineer at Self-employed · | 4 upvotes · 20.7K views

I see it's been some time since this was posted, but I'm glad you are migrating to Next.js 🎉!

Me personally, I would run an Express.js backend so that frontend and backend logics don't feel blurred, especially if you want to attract more developers to your project. Keeping frontend separated from the backend makes for a healthier workspace ecosystem and often confuses people less. Furthermore, implementation is a lot easier and later on as you move from RoR to an Express.js server there won't be too much confusion as to how certain parts mesh together.

Based on the features you're looking at I would consider using websockets (WSS or Socket.IO) for the chat application or rolling that with features from WebRTC, which you would need to support video streaming anyways. For authentication you could look at Auth0 which has some very nice libs for authentication or you could rig up your own stitching individual OAuths (Google, Facebook, etc.) along with a simple User/Pass signup that you manage in your database. For payment I would consider using Stripe, it's very popular in the JS ecosystem right now, has lots of documentation and features, and is also pretty cost-effective.

I know it's been some time since you have posted this and you have already made some decisions, but if you (or anyone else reading this) has any question feel free to let me know :)

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Needs advice
on
ASP.NETASP.NETJavaScriptJavaScript
and
Node.jsNode.js

I am about to complete my graduation with a computer science background. I want to pursue my career in software development. My front-end knowledge is very poor. I didn't like PHP so I didn't go for Laravel. My university offers a course on ASP.NET, I liked C# that's why I took asp.net. But now I think .net tech is unnecessarily complicated and most of the job offers available for .net are not for freshers. Should I try js and Node.js now? I mean as a fresher which tech stack should I choose for web development(Backend)?

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Replies (2)
Anthony Chiboucas
Software Engineer & Support Operations Lead · | 5 upvotes · 96.4K views
Recommends
on
JavaScriptJavaScriptNode.jsNode.js

Just don't .NET. It was a failed idea from the start. Node and javascript are easier to learn, with much wider adoption, and more active communities.

.NET is an old experiment in using a markup language to separate the UI from the business logic. The idea was that this would allow a small team of hyper-competent engineers to build the tooling and code for a large team of less-skilled front-end developers to leverage. In practice, leveraging that customized UI markup requires understanding and adjusting the underlying code. The result is that any UI change requires a hyper-competent .NET engineer.

However, many larger companies bought into it a long time ago, and now have a hard dependency on old monolithic .NET ecosystems, and they do need .NET developers to maintain them.

So, you can get a well paying .NET job without much difficulty. However, you'll neither like it, nor be doing anything interesting. There's no growth here, only a very long slow death of .NET (that'll probably take another 20 years).

Node and Javascript are sticking around, and still growing.

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Mahmoud Gabr
Software engineer at AlgoDriven · | 4 upvotes · 96.6K views
Recommends
on
ASP.NETASP.NET

What I can see, you are confusing yourself, if you studied .Net now it's better to work as .Net developer, and you will find opportunities as fresh. Just search and don't waste your time. After you get more experience in .Net, then you can learn NodeJS if you still need to learn it.

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Decisions about Node.js and Rails
SamuelBonilla
Senior Developer at Graphul · | 20 upvotes · 33.3K views

Graphul is an Express inspired web framework using a powerful extractor system. Designed to improve, speed, and scale your microservices with a friendly syntax, Graphul is built with Rust. that means Graphul gets memory safety, reliability, concurrency, and performance for free. helping to save money on infrastructure.

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Mark Esser
Director People & Culture at i22 Digitalagentur GmbH · | 8 upvotes · 114.6K views

A developer and project manager from our team X says the following about our use of Rails at i22:

"We use Rails to build stable and flexible backend systems. Rails is extremely good for managing data structures and quickly setting up new systems. It is the perfect base for most use cases."

I asked the same Team X member why the team prefers to work with Ruby on Rails, rather than Python and Django:

"Because Python is a scripting language and from my point of view not suitable for building stable web services. Python is for me rather good for scripts and fast small tools. Not for stable business applications. And if I want it fast I prefer Go."

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Saulius Kolesinskas
Engineering Manager at Vinted · | 11 upvotes · 30.7K views

In 2017, we decided to move away from Backbone and embrace a relatively new tool which was taking the industry by storm, React. Since Backbone was no longer actively maintained and its popularity was falling, it made sense to adopt a tool that was on the rise and promised improved performance, developer experience and delivery speed. In addition, it became easier to hire Frontend Engineers as the talent pool greatly increased. Nowadays, React is the framework of choice across Vinted.

Typescript entered the picture at a later stage. We placed our initial bet on Flow but it soon became obvious that the industry prefers Typescript. In 2019, we migrated to Typescript and never looked back. Having a strongly typed language in our frontend brought confidence to the engineers and greatly reduced the number of bugs.

Next.js is the newest addition to the stack. Vinted is currently a Rails monolith and React on Rails is used to render views. In order to transform Vinted to a single-page application (SPA) and split backend from frontend, we decided to adopt Next.js. Among the options considered, Next.js offered the most comprehensive feature set, good support for Server Side Rendering (SSR) and a vibrant community. We also expect that splitting the client-side would lead to improved developer experience and faster builds.

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Benjamin Stirrup

NestJS has a very good documention. Furthermore, as a former django-user myself, I believe it is nice to finally get a backend node.js framework very much opiniated like Django. It may be related to what I previously said, but in terms of enterprise-used framework, it seems that Nest.js is the most popular.

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Noe Osorio

Node Js have worked incredible great for me on every project I had. It is fast enough to support big and small apps, you do not have to worry about performance, because it is very capable of building a big REST API.

One advantage is that the learning curve is lower when you have used javascript on web browser as frontend, so, it is easy to migrate from Frontend to Backend with node.

Node Package Manager (NPM) has an incredible amount of packages from many developers, so you can use them on your project as you need them.

Code is easy to support, way different than Java Legacy code.

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We choose Next.js for our React framework because it's very minimal and has a very organized file structure. Also, it offers key features like zero setups, automatic server rendering and code splitting, typescript support. Our app requires some loading time to process the video, server-side rendering will allow our website to display faster than client-side rending.

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Ing. Alvaro Rodríguez Scelza
Software Systems Engineer at Ripio · | 12 upvotes · 376.4K views

I was considering focusing on learning RoR and looking for a work that uses those techs.

After some investigation, I decided to stay with C# .NET:

  • It is more requested on job positions (7 to 1 in my personal searches average).

  • It's been around for longer.

  • it has better documentation and community.

  • One of Ruby advantages (its amazing community gems, that allows to quickly build parts of your systems by merely putting together third party components) gets quite complicated to use and maintain in huge applications, where building and reusing your own components may become a better approach.

  • Rail's front end support is starting to waver.

  • C# .NET code is far easier to understand, debug and maintain. Although certainly not easier to learn from scratch.

  • Though Rails has an excellent programming speed, C# tends to get the upper hand in long term projects.

I would avise to stick to rails when building small projects, and switching to C# for more long term ones.

Opinions are welcome!

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Hampton Catlin
VP of Engineering at Rent The Runway · | 7 upvotes · 445.5K views

Starting a new company in 2020, with a whole new stack, is a really interesting opportunity for me to look back over the last 20 years of my career with web software and make the right decision for my company.

And, I went with the most radical decision– which is to ignore "sexy" / "hype" technologies almost entirely, and go back to a stack that I first used over 15 years ago.

For my purposes, we are building a video streaming platform, where I wanted rapid customer-facing feature development, high testability, simple scaling, and ease of hiring great, experienced talent. To be clear, our web platform is NOT responsible for handling the actual bits and bytes of the video itself, that's an entirely different stack. It simply needs to manage the business rules and the customers experience of the video content.

I reviewed a lot of different technologies, but none of them seemed to fit the bill as well as Rails did! The hype train had long left the station with Rails, and the community is a little more sparse than it was previously. And, to be honest, Ruby was the language that was easiest for developers, but I find that most languages out there have adopted many of it's innovations for ease of use – or at least corrected their own.

Even with all of that, Rails still seems like the best framework for developing web applications that are no more complex than they need to be. And that's key to me, because it's very easy to go use React and Redux and GraphQL and a whole host of AWS Lamba's to power my blog... but you simply don't actually NEED that.

There are two choices I made in our stack that were new for me personally, and very different than what I would have chosen even 5 years ago.

1) Postgres - I decided to switch from MySql to Postgres for this project. I wanted to use UUID's instead of numeric primary keys, and knew I'd have a couple places where better JSON/object support would be key. Mysql remains far more popular, but almost every developer I respect has switched and preferred Postgres with a strong passion. It's not "sexy" but it's considered "better".

2) Stimulus.js - This was definitely the biggest and wildest choice to make. Stimulus is a Javascript framework by my old friend Sam Stephenson (Prototype.js, rbenv, turbolinks) and DHH, and it is a sort of radical declaration that your Javascript in the browser can be both powerful and modern AND simple. It leans heavily on the belief that HTML-is-good and that data-* attributes are good. It focuses on the actions and interactions and not on the rendering aspects. It took me a while to wrap my head around, and I still have to remind myself, that server-side-HTML is how you solve many problems with this stack, and avoid trying to re-render things just in the browser. So far, I'm happy with this choice, but it is definitely a radical departure from the current trends.

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Chose
RailsRails
over
DjangoDjango

I have used both the tools . Both of them are super awesome , very reliable and their learning curve is also super easy. But, the reason I choose Ruby on Rails over Django is the fact that the dependency injection is super easy in Rails than Django. What I mean is the fact that, Django requires a lot of import statement to do a lot of work, which remembering is not so easy and even after that you may need to write a lot of code. But Ruby on Rails uses gem to add addition feature or dependency in the project. Which requires just copying the gem statement from github and pasting it in the Gemfile, then running bundle install(these days just bundle works super fine). And there you are with the new feature in your app. You can see this with the example of Authentication, where in Django you require several steps like adding class based views and many more, but in rails it's just as easy as installing the 'devise' gem . And if you want to make it beautiful use bootstrap_template gem to make it look prettier. Now with Rails 6 , Rails is a total developer's fervent friend because it has come up with features like Action Mail and Action Text.

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Omran Jamal
CTO & Co-founder at Bonton Connect · | 7 upvotes · 586.9K views

We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.

This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.

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What are some alternatives to Node.js and Rails?
AngularJS
AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.
PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
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