Node.js vs Rails vs Revel

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Node.js

190.4K
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8.5K
Rails

19.8K
13.4K
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5.4K
Revel

36
100
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38

Node.js vs Rails vs Revel: What are the differences?

Introduction

Node.js, Rails, and Revel are all popular web application frameworks that are widely used to develop dynamic and interactive websites. While they serve the same purpose, there are several key differences between them in terms of programming language, architecture, community support, and performance. This article will outline the main differences between Node.js, Rails, and Revel.

  1. Programming Language:
  2. Node.js is primarily based on JavaScript, which allows developers to use a single language for both server-side and client-side programming.
  3. Rails is a framework written in Ruby, a dynamic, object-oriented programming language known for its simplicity and readability.
  4. Revel is built on Go (or Golang), a statically typed compiled language that focuses on simplicity, efficiency, and concurrency.

  5. Architecture:

  6. Node.js follows an event-driven, non-blocking architecture, commonly known as the "single-threaded, event loop model," which enables it to handle multiple concurrent requests efficiently.

  7. Rails follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which separates the application logic into three interconnected components.

  8. Revel also follows the MVC pattern but uses a variation called "convention over configuration," which reduces the need for manual configuration.

  9. Community Support:

  10. Node.js has a large and active community with a vast number of libraries and frameworks available through the Node Package Manager (npm), offering extensive support and resources for developers.

  11. Rails also boasts a strong community with a rich ecosystem of gems (libraries) that provide ready-made solutions for various requirements.

  12. Revel has a relatively smaller community compared to Node.js and Rails, resulting in fewer resources and fewer community-contributed packages.

  13. Performance:

  14. Node.js has gained popularity for its excellent performance due to its non-blocking, event-driven architecture, making it suitable for handling a large number of concurrent connections with relatively low resource usage.

  15. Rails prioritizes developer convenience and convention over raw performance, which may result in slightly lower performance compared to Node.js in high-traffic applications.

  16. Revel is designed to be high-performance, utilizing Go's efficient execution model and built-in features like goroutines, channels, and memory management to ensure fast and scalable applications.

  17. Learning Curve:

  18. Node.js can have a steeper learning curve for developers who are not familiar with JavaScript or asynchronous programming concepts.

  19. Rails embraces convention over configuration, providing developers with a set of default behaviors and folder structures, making it easier to get started even for beginners.

  20. Revel aims for simplicity and ease of use, making it relatively straightforward to learn for developers, especially those with prior programming experience.

  21. Scalability and Real-time Communication:

  22. Node.js is known for its scalability and is often used for real-time applications, chat systems, and streaming platforms thanks to its event-driven architecture and support for WebSockets.

  23. Rails and Revel can also handle scalability and real-time communication, but they may require additional configurations, third-party libraries, or integrations to achieve similar performance as Node.js.

In summary, Node.js offers the advantage of using JavaScript for both server and client-side programming, along with excellent performance. Rails provides easy development with convention over configuration and a well-established Ruby community. Revel, built on Go, offers performance and simplicity with a smaller community. The choice between these frameworks depends on the specific project requirements, developer expertise, and considerations of language, architecture, community support, performance, learning curve, and real-time capabilities.

Advice on Node.js, Rails, and Revel
Shanover Saiyed
Software Engineer (Web) · | 4 upvotes · 65.6K 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
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JavaScriptJavaScriptNext.jsNext.js
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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 · 18.6K 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 · 85.4K 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 · 85.6K 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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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoRailsRails
and
SpringSpring
in

Hi everyone! I'm starting a personal project that I've been postponing for a little while and I'm starting with the backend first.

  • It's an app that needs to query open APIs (It could go up to a hundred APIs) and do filtering and other manipulations onto the data and then store it in my own database. So basically, the end result medium/long term is a lot of data!

  • Besides filtering/storing data from other APIs, the API will interact with my client application. I should note that the client app attempts to give real-time information.

Question: I would want to launch the API within 6 months as I'm also planning to make it available for other devs through platforms like RapidAPI. With all being said, my question is twofold:

  1. Which backend framework would allow me to do these operations with the best response time possible?

  2. Which framework would be the easiest to deal with deployment on AWS?

Background:

I have a background in Spring since I'm using it at work, I have none in Rails and Django but I don't mind trying something new as long as the learning curve isn't crazy. I know python but not Ruby. Beginner on AWS and choose that one after some research.

Thank you very much, sorry it was a bit long. Cheers

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Replies (1)
Jorge Velasco
Full Stack Developer at Fintual · | 8 upvotes · 87.1K views

The most relevant part is the central architecture more than the specific backend. For me, it makes sense to go for an event-driven solution. In this case, an event is emitted on every new data, and one or more listeners react to it. In AWS, you can easily get this by storing your data in DynamoDB, which is pretty fast, and have as many lambdas working on the received data (here you can find more details). This way, you keep your worker(s) busy fetching data while others consolidate it. I wouldn't get too crazy on the lambdas, and I'd start with one as there will be only one client by your description. My only concern is how similar the APIs you're consuming are. Depending on that, it may be easier to have different lambdas by target API. My only note on the backend language is that if you want low latency, I'd discard Python and Ruby and choose Go (I know that is not in the list, but given that you're open to learning a new language, you could give it a try). It is easy to learn, has excellent performance, and is the only Lamdba runtime with an X (1.X) in the supported language, making it a great choice.

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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjango
and
Node.jsNode.js
in

Situation: I need to make a website for my Final Year Project. It's the website for brain analysis. The website features include chat, blogs, posts, users, payment methods. One of the main features includes the use of AI, which I know only in Python.

Decisions and Confusions: I decided to make two backends and one front-end. One backend will be using Django with GraphQL/RestAPI that will be running my AI models. The other backend is for the website. It will add users, chat, post, etc. I'm thinking of using TypeScript, Prisma, ExpressJS, GraphQL, MongoDB/PostgreSQL.

Please guide me to the latest and stable tech stack I can use. Because one of the requirements of our Final Year Project is to use the latest tech stacks. 1st Backend advice? (This will be used to run AI models) 2nd Backend advice? Frontend to 2nd Backend advice?

Thank you.

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Replies (2)

Hey there 👋,

Daniel from the Prisma team here.

I think your choice of a stack would work well for your final year project.

Some recommendations: - Use PostgreSQL if you need a stable stack. Prisma support for MongoDB is currently in Preview and therefore isn't stable. Moreover, PostgreSQL being a relational database enforces a schema more strictly than MongoDB which is useful given that your data model involves multiple relations. - If your Django backend exposes a REST API, you can also expose it over the GraphQL API by proxying requests from the GraphQL API to the REST API. That way, you have a unified API for all operations. This is typically known as wrapping. - Regarding the GraphQL part, I would consider looking at Nexus and nexus-prisma.

For inspiration, check out the Prisma Examples ​repository which contains many ready-to-run examples.

Here's another fully-fledged example using Prisma, Fastify, GraphQL, and PostgreSQL: https://github.com/2color/fastify-graphql-nexus-prisma

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Recommends
on
FastAPIFastAPIKubernetesKubernetes

Hi. Maybe you can try use FastAPI instead Django https://fastapi.tiangolo.com It could be faster. The FastAPI documentation is so useful and elegant.

Also you can try split a little more the backend and use an "microservice" architecture. Using Kubernetes to deploy your services.

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Abdullah Adeel
Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoNode.jsNode.js
and
RedisRedis

Hey everyone, I am planning to start a personal project that would be yet another social media project with real-time communication facilities like one-to-one chat, group chat, and later voice and video chat using WebRTC. The thing I am concerned about is Django being able to handle all the real-time stuff using websockets. I can use Django Channels, but I don't think that would be a very scalable solution. Moreover, django_channels require alto of configurations, and deployment is also a pain. My plan is to use a separate Node.js server to handle all the socket connections and have it talk to the main django server through Redis. My question is whether the above-mentioned solution is a good choice? If yes, how this can be achieved, keeping in mind all the authentication other related problems. It might be simple, but I have never done this before, which might be the main reason I am concerned. But any suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance 😊

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Replies (1)
Sergey St.

Try to do it with less - Nodejs + Redis + socket.io, optionally you can always communicate with django, but you can do it all in Nodejs, use pm2 and cluster too. For Redis you can also use Pub/Sub, is a good combination for future scaling.

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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjangoLaravelLaravel
and
RailsRails

Which is better of Laravel, Rails and Django for creating great products quickly?

Which is better for creating open source apps that others might want to contribute to?

I want a mature tool for creating web apps that qualifies for:

  • Quick prototyping
  • Easy to get to production level for backend
  • Maintainable and buildable by one person alone
  • Enforces conformity, so others can easily read and contribute to the code, making successfully open sourcing possible
  • Works well with React
  • Has a mature and fairly stable ecosystem for the basics (auth, storage, db, image handling, backups, change history, etc.
  • Has an ecosystem that will still be alive in 10 years, responding to changes.

I would have to learn Ruby, Python or PHP for each, so that factors in too.

I'm proficient in React and Node.js, but I feel the node backend ecosystem is too immature with a million different ways to do everything, and too many decisions to make, too much wiring to get everything to work together, and too many packages that end up not being supported a few months down the line.

Which would you choose for me to learn?

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Replies (5)
Reza Malek
at Meam Software Engineering Group · | 7 upvotes · 138K views
Recommends
on
DjangoDjangoRailsRails

Comparing them end-to-end, Rails comes the most productive in my opinion. But there are bolder parameters you may consider. i.e. no one switches from Django to Rails to improve productivity and vice versa (probably from Laravel to one of those two).

  • The language's productivity also matters, which both Ruby and Python are better for that.

  • There is a philosophical difference between #Django and #Rails :

  • Django supports the "Explicit over Implicit" idea, making it easier for newcomers to understand what's going on. This idea also has downsides. This allows beginners to start working with Django without even learning Django and best practices and defer learning by using references like Stackoverflow.com, which is not a good idea because you potentially don't know things that you don't know! Also, you may find many different project styles.

  • On the other hand, Rails support the "Convention over configuration" and Scaffolding idea. It's easier for a Rails developer to be added to a new project or just review a random Rails project. Everything has a default and also it has some downsides as well. e.g. As a beginner, everything feels like magic in Rails, and you don't understand what is going on and how Rails understand while you didn't "explicitly" say what do you want sometimes.

Conclusion: Rails and Django are more productive and you can build projects on your own quickly (many giant startups launched this way!).

Node.JS isn't immature, also sometimes shows better performance comparing the mentioned alternatives. But if you suffer from "a million different ways to do everything" and "many decisions to make", Take Ruby on Rails for sure.

P.S: for learning RoR I suggest the book/video from Michael Hartl.

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Recommends
on
DjangoDjango

I picked Django because we use it at work. But honestly, if you don't know any of them, I would look at the jobs around where you live and learn the one that either has the most jobs posted or if you can look at the trends the one that is growing the number of jobs the most.

All three would satisfy your needs and all three are good choices. Dotnet core would also be a good choice, again if there are jobs in your area for said technologies. If you literally don't care about this for employment, learn them all and just do it in alphabetical order :)

Note: I think you are wrong about Node being too immature - there are also MOSTLY standards for everything you want to do on the backend that have not changed for many years.

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Andrew Kornilov
Co-founder, Principal Developer · | 4 upvotes · 77K views
Recommends

Rails uses too much magic and sugar. Laravel is something from the previous century. I'd say Django can be well balanced choice. I have extensive experience with all three. So, this advice based on practical projects

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Malo Skrylev
Principal at Znamenica · | 3 upvotes · 78K views

I recommend Ruby/Rails. I write the text in question answer form:

Quick prototyping

Yes you can use the prototyping in Rails or not. And this can be realized by adding any of testing framework like Cucumber or RSpec for example. Writing the test you can work on the application prototype without a change real code in production, or even development environment.

Easy to get to production level for backend

Yes it is easy, you are able to use the capistrano gem with its modules, if required, to deploy application to production within a day.

Maintainable and buildable by one person alone

Since the Rails gets on itself the main code part of a data processing, you are able easily to generate the required code with build-in Rails or external gem generators, and to merely maintain the your code, if you would cover it with a test of selected test framework.

Enforces conformity, so others can easily read and contribute to the code, making successfully open sourcing possible

As far as I said you can barely control a contribution to your project with using the test covering frameworks, to keep conformity the project.

Works well with React

You can use React along with any JS NPM module easily using webpacker gem.

Has a mature and fairly stable ecosystem for the basics (auth, storage, db, image handling, backups, change history, etc.

Of course the Rails framework is supported by many three-side gems, which can be found at rubygems, that support the authentication (devise), storage feature (fog), db (pg/mysql/sqlite3), image handling (rmagick), backups (backup), change history (history)

Has an ecosystem that will still be alive in 10 years, responding to changes.

Ruby/Rails with the RubyGem ecosystem is actively envolving and not plan to be collapsed and abandned with of development both Ruby language and Rails framework.

So, you can freely and fearlessly start using the Rails framework as server side base for your project.

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Sebastian Gaviria Tangarife

DJango after a little practice, with migrations and support to a lot of libraries and modules is very efficient to create small projects.

Edit: Between Laravel, Django or RoR (Ruby on Rails)

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Needs advice
on
DjangoDjango.NET Core.NET Core
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Node.jsNode.js

Looking for Advice! I am developing a hybrid app for video streaming, I have a prior experience with .NET Core and would like to use it for my back end but the latest buzz on characteristics of Node.js such as light weight, event loop and Async capabilities is really tempting me to reconsider my decision. On a quick research I could observe that a lot of Internet companies use either Python Django or Node JS for their back end which has thrown me into confusion, looking for an expert advice, thx.

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Replies (5)
Brandon Miller
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

If you want to create a reliable video streaming service, you'll probably want to go with a UDP approach. TCP will throw an exception as soon as a packet drops. That being said..... Node.js is ultimately a bad choice. Way too high-level. I've found, when working with UDP, it's much more performant on lower level languages like C, etc. As far as my recommendation, if you want to go with something 'new' and fun, check out GoLang. It's low level, and developed to handle high performance at scale.

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anas mattar
Technical Lead at DPO International · | 5 upvotes · 192.2K views
Recommends
on
.NET Core.NET Core

That's depend on your experience if you are very well in C# you should start using the Technology that's you know and like it.

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So none of these tools may be bad for your implementation of this streaming app. But one thing to consider is what are you trying to achieve. If your application is more front end facing with streaming to a backend service C# may be your better implementation path just due to its greater overall versatility in terms of options for mobile, backend development, front end development, service development, etc... However if your focused purely on the streaming aspects and utilizing Amazon or Azure services in conjunction with the language of choice, Python, Node.Js, Django or other technologies may offer a faster option to success. Another thing to consider is many of the streaming platforms today utilize services from cloud vendors to achieve their success more than simply the ingenuity on the part of their internal staff's programming skills. Traditional programming languages like Java, C++, C# are used less these days. Today most teams are piggybacking off these services where its possible to give your application the greatest ability to compete with the big boys. - Your Friendly Neighborhood Tech Manager

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Aslam Mohammad
Systems Engineer at Infosys · | 2 upvotes · 177K views
Recommends
on
DjangoDjangoNode.jsNode.js

You could apparently go for both Node or Django but I would recommend choosing Node as you're building a video streaming app and the biggest video streaming service Netflix used Node in the production.

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Pavel Nekrasov
MyOpenTour at MyOpenTour · | 1 upvotes · 154.1K views
Recommends
on
fastapifastapi
at

Take a look at FastAPI if you are going to choose Python

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Needs advice
on
LaravelLaravel
and
Node.jsNode.js

What will be better Laravel or Node.js to handle a logistics portal which displays thousands (20-50k) of delivery data information in an interactive table (searchable, filterable), live delivery tracking, basic user management, and report creation?

Data comes usually in CSV (manually uploaded or via API from courier companies). Live tracking uses checks tracking numbers on the courier page using API.

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Replies (1)
Francis Rodrigues
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LaravelLaravelNode.jsNode.js

My question for you is: "Which one are you familiar with?" Following your needs, both could do it, but think about it. Now talking about Node.js, in my opinion, if you use JavaScript, there are lots of packages to support your entire project, including native ones for testing TDD and others for BDD. Also the best support on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

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Leonardo Viada
Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital · | 4 upvotes · 2.7M views
Needs advice
on
PlayPlayRailsRails
and
ScalaScala
at

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

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Replies (4)
Kevin Emery
QE Systems Engineer at Discovery, Inc. · | 6 upvotes · 53.4K views
Recommends
on
RailsRails

I don't have the Scala experience to compare the two, but I can say that Ruby is a wonderful language. For procedural programming where you don't need a lot of concurrent execution threads, it's superior to Node.JS in my opinion. All of the concepts from Typescript have equivalent syntax in Ruby, but there are fewer symbols (e.g. () => { ... }); ) and more keywords (eg 'do ... end'). It's a very flexible language and allows for a lot of different approaches to how it's written, so coding standards and careful organization is important. In the long run, however, you'll find it quicker to debug than Node.JS and just as powerful.

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ALESSIO SALTARIN
Distinguished IT Architect at IBM · | 5 upvotes · 54.2K views

If you are comfortable with TypeScript, why not evolve to a C# ecosystem? Asp.Net Core + Entity Framework is a mature and well supported technology. As far as I can see in the enterprise market, the most adopted choice is still Java. So, maybe you may have a look to SpringBoot - and ultimately Quarkus.

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Hosam Aly
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 45.6K views
Recommends
on
PlayPlayRailsRailsScalaScala

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

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Reza Malek
at Meam Software Engineering Group · | 3 upvotes · 45.6K views
Recommends
on
RailsRailsScalaScala

This is advice regardless of your background and requirements. The Play framework has a terrible and complicated design, don't risk it. I even suggest Spring and Kotlin over it! You can use Scala for small services and Data Engineering stuff and benefit optimizations and threading of JVM. RoR, on the other hand, has a huge development speed, which I believe is a big advantage cause you can handle performance bottlenecks later. Also, Scala has another downside, which is featureful in terms of OO and FP paradigms, which makes anyone write code freely with any personal style and makes it a problem in a team, Hence a coding style has to be defined if there would be Scala development team.

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Decisions about Node.js, Rails, and Revel
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
FullStack Engineer at Finloop · | 9 upvotes · 96.8K views

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 · 349.4K 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 · 415.7K 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 · 547.9K 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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Since I came from python I had two choices: #django or #flask. It felt like it was a better idea to go for #django considering I was building a blogging platform, this is kind of what #django was made for. On the other hand, #rails seems to be a fantastic framework to get things done. Although I do not regret any of my time spent on developing with #django I want to give #rails a try some day in the future for the sake of curiosity.

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As a small team, we wanted to pick the framework which allowed us to move quickly. There's no option better than Rails. Not having to solve the fundamentals means we can more quickly build our feature set. No other framework can beat ActiveRecord in terms of integration & ease-of use. To top it all of, there's a lot of attention paid to security in the framework, making almost everything safe-by-default.

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Hey guys,

My backend set up is Prisma / GraphQL-Yoga at the moment, and I love it. It's so intuitive to learn and is really neat on the frontend too, however, there were a few gotchas when I was learning! Especially around understanding how it all pieces together (the stack). There isn't a great deal of information out there on exactly how to put into production my set up, which is a backend set up on a Digital Ocean droplet with Prisma/GraphQL Yoga in a Docker Container using Next & Apollo Client on the frontend somewhere else. It's such a niche subject, so I bet only a few hundred people have got a website with this stack in production. Anyway, I wrote a blog post to help those who might need help understanding it. Here it is, hope it helps!

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Pros of Node.js
Pros of Rails
Pros of Revel
  • 1.4K
    Npm
  • 1.3K
    Javascript
  • 1.1K
    Great libraries
  • 1K
    High-performance
  • 805
    Open source
  • 486
    Great for apis
  • 477
    Asynchronous
  • 423
    Great community
  • 390
    Great for realtime apps
  • 296
    Great for command line utilities
  • 84
    Websockets
  • 83
    Node Modules
  • 69
    Uber Simple
  • 59
    Great modularity
  • 58
    Allows us to reuse code in the frontend
  • 42
    Easy to start
  • 35
    Great for Data Streaming
  • 32
    Realtime
  • 28
    Awesome
  • 25
    Non blocking IO
  • 18
    Can be used as a proxy
  • 17
    High performance, open source, scalable
  • 16
    Non-blocking and modular
  • 15
    Easy and Fun
  • 14
    Easy and powerful
  • 13
    Future of BackEnd
  • 13
    Same lang as AngularJS
  • 12
    Fullstack
  • 11
    Fast
  • 10
    Scalability
  • 10
    Cross platform
  • 9
    Simple
  • 8
    Mean Stack
  • 7
    Great for webapps
  • 7
    Easy concurrency
  • 6
    Typescript
  • 6
    Fast, simple code and async
  • 6
    React
  • 6
    Friendly
  • 5
    Control everything
  • 5
    Its amazingly fast and scalable
  • 5
    Easy to use and fast and goes well with JSONdb's
  • 5
    Scalable
  • 5
    Great speed
  • 5
    Fast development
  • 4
    It's fast
  • 4
    Easy to use
  • 4
    Isomorphic coolness
  • 3
    Great community
  • 3
    Not Python
  • 3
    Sooper easy for the Backend connectivity
  • 3
    TypeScript Support
  • 3
    Blazing fast
  • 3
    Performant and fast prototyping
  • 3
    Easy to learn
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Scales, fast, simple, great community, npm, express
  • 3
    One language, end-to-end
  • 3
    Less boilerplate code
  • 2
    Npm i ape-updating
  • 2
    Event Driven
  • 2
    Lovely
  • 1
    Creat for apis
  • 0
    Node
  • 856
    Rapid development
  • 652
    Great gems
  • 606
    Great community
  • 484
    Convention over configuration
  • 417
    Mvc
  • 348
    Great for web
  • 343
    Beautiful code
  • 310
    Open source
  • 270
    Great libraries
  • 261
    Active record
  • 108
    Elegant
  • 90
    Easy to learn
  • 88
    Easy Database Migrations
  • 82
    Makes you happy
  • 75
    Free
  • 62
    Great routing
  • 54
    Has everything you need to get the job done
  • 41
    Great Data Modeling
  • 38
    MVC - Easy to start on
  • 38
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Easy setup
  • 26
    Great caching
  • 25
    Ultra rapid development time
  • 22
    It's super easy
  • 17
    Great Resources
  • 16
    Easy to build mockups that work
  • 14
    Less Boilerplate
  • 7
    Developer Friendly
  • 7
    API Development
  • 6
    Great documentation
  • 5
    Easy REST API creation
  • 5
    Quick
  • 4
    Intuitive
  • 4
    Great language
  • 4
    Haml and sass
  • 4
    Easy to learn, use, improvise and update
  • 2
    Metaprogramming
  • 2
    It works
  • 2
    Jet packs come standard
  • 2
    Easy and fast
  • 2
    Legacy
  • 1
    It's intuitive
  • 1
    Convention over configuration
  • 1
    Easy Testing
  • 1
    Cancan
  • 16
    Go
  • 6
    High-Productivity
  • 5
    Full-Stack
  • 4
    High performance
  • 4
    MVC
  • 2
    Open source
  • 1
    Simple

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Cons of Node.js
Cons of Rails
Cons of Revel
  • 46
    Bound to a single CPU
  • 45
    New framework every day
  • 40
    Lots of terrible examples on the internet
  • 33
    Asynchronous programming is the worst
  • 24
    Callback
  • 19
    Javascript
  • 11
    Dependency based on GitHub
  • 11
    Dependency hell
  • 10
    Low computational power
  • 7
    Can block whole server easily
  • 7
    Callback functions may not fire on expected sequence
  • 7
    Very very Slow
  • 4
    Breaking updates
  • 4
    Unstable
  • 3
    No standard approach
  • 3
    Unneeded over complication
  • 1
    Can't read server session
  • 1
    Bad transitive dependency management
  • 24
    Too much "magic" (hidden behavior)
  • 14
    Poor raw performance
  • 12
    Asset system is too primitive and outdated
  • 6
    Heavy use of mixins
  • 6
    Bloat in models
  • 4
    Very Very slow
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    What is Node.js?

    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.

    What is Rails?

    Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

    What is Revel?

    Revel makes it easy to build web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern by relying on conventions that require a certain structure in your application. In return, it is very light on configuration and enables an extremely fast development cycle.

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    What are some alternatives to Node.js, Rails, and Revel?
    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.
    See all alternatives