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.

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.

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.

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.

Greate documentation, lot's of info on StackOverflow and it's easy to learn, a lot of things it's already implemented on the stack. It's based on Ruby which is stable and constantly evolving.

Ruby/Rails have a lot of gems(libraries) that will allow you to connect to many DB systems, implement JWT or use a library for authentication.

I have a lot of API's created in Rails that respond to website and mobile apps, and you can create your first one without a lot of stress, responding with JSON easily.

You can use VSCode has good support for ruby and you will have all syntax help etc, I use Atom but I don't have the syntax support, didn't found a good package for that.

The most popular stack that comes to mind for your case if MERN ( Mongo, Express, React and Node) I would use Nodejs + Express for backend. Easy to build dynamic and powerful REST APIs. For DB, it would be Mongo DB and front end can be React + Redux (for global state management). Plus NPM has a ton of packages for most cases. PS : Webstorm (free for students) or VS Code ( free for all) for IDE

I would take either Rails or Node for your problem.

Rails is a great framework: super complete in regards of testing frameworks, authentication libraries, great community support.... but I would say that the latest versions are a bit of a mess for newcomers, because of the way they manage assets: if the assets are served by the framework(Assets Pipeline) vs using Webpack .

If you are already familiar with React, Node is another great framework that will require a bit more effort on selecting the dependencies but for your use case seems a great candidate.

In regards of what you are commenting about learning during the process, both can be Dockerized pretty easy and you can spend some time digging on the lifecycle of putting it into production. Rails has a ridiculous easy way of deploying with Heroku avoiding any kind of work, but if you want to get your hands dirty you can deploy either of the frameworks on a Dockerized environment to any cloud provider you like. That part is really interesting too, and if you are interested on the Devops side, I would say that Node is a bit easier and more convenient(smaller image sizes and times to build) than Rails. All in all:

Rails pros: stable framework, great community support, great testing utilities. Rails cons: How they manage the assets lately(Assets Pipeline vs Webpack), dockerize the app.

Node pros: You are already familiar with Js, simple, easy to put in prod allowing to spend time in the Devops side. Node cons: Dependency management in Js environments is a pain in the ass

Rails is an easy framework to pick up, and you'll get to love all of the magic it does for you. Some of that can be a little confusing at first but once you've got acquainted, this is part of the productivity Rails offers as opposed to other languages or frameworks that sometimes tend to require developers to waste a ton of valuable time setting up their own boilerplate when starting to work on a new project. More pragmatically, Rails is still extremely popular at both startups and at large companies, you can use it to power web applications, or backend APIs, and this will be extremely valuable on your resume. There also is a very large/rich set of libraries (called gems) that will allow you to focus on your actual project/product, rather than rebuilding what already exists. I'd recommend you go with the latest versions of Ruby (3.0) and Rails (6.1.1) so you are from the get-go learning them in their most current form.

Node.js is great if you already know Javascript. If not, JS is pretty easy to learn. There are many resources and tutorials online for JS and Node. ASP.NET (Core) is a good option if you know C# or need high performance. Node.js isn't a complete framework like .NET, so you need to add Express or another HTTP server, and Database connectors etc.

Although not entirely confident, as I've never used Django and I've not used ASP.NET since 2.0, but given your requirements, at first thought, I'd go with Rails.

Yet, may I ask if have you considered some BAAS such as Firebase, Hasura and the like? Although I've admittedly suffered a bit with Firebase - I'm not totally sure if I've used it correctly, tho. But I've heard really awesome things about Hasura. This slant compairson shows some Firebase's alternatives that I've never heard. In your position, I would have a look.

Cheers.

I recomand to take a look at this https://dev.to/andrewbaisden/creating-mern-stack-applications-2020-4a44

You are probably referring to ruby on rails for web development and nodejs for building the backend. Nodejs has frameworks such as express and next which not only provides a minimal code to build a backend but also gives the flexibility to try and experiment with the framework choices. For example you can have express framework + Passport for OAuth .... etc. The flexibility and the constant improvement of the language provides a good reason to opt for nodejs. Nodejs uses javascript which makes your code uniform when you are working full stack i.e react in front end and nodejs in backend.

I'd use the following metaphor to non-technical people. Rails is like a prepackaged toolkit, which can get most of the common tasks done fairly with ease. Whereas, node.js with whatever backend framekwork of choice, is like a DIY toolkit assembled by mix-and-match different tools in a large tool shop. Of course, at times DIY toolkit can do better on specific tasks. Given that you are the only dev on the project, I'd assume that the resource is fairly limited. And looks like you are not building some next-gen super duper fast smart application. So Just go with the prepackaged toolkit then. Rails is a very opinionated framework, there're pros and cons to it. But thanks to that, many of the gems are coded with it in mind. For example, they are all designed with same naming convention. Many will work well together out-of-box, for example devise and cancancan. Besides, many stuff are built in the framework. For example, logging utility, csrf protection, session encryption, etc. Yes, many of those stuff may not be useful or necessary at the beginning of the project life-cycle. However, down the road, there is a good chance you will need some of those. And the moment you realize that you already have it, it's so delightful. In addition, it's usually easier to debug a rails app than a node app in my experience. Personally, the cases where I would pick node.js over rails would be projects either require a) high-performance, or b) certain core functionality that has been implemented by some node packages but not by any ruby gems. In term of performance, node has a clear advantage over any other major web frameworks, except the ones built with go. It's simply a language feature. Node allows developer to easily write code that runs db query, external api calls, or other stuff of that nature in parallel. And that is THE MOST COMMON performance bottleneck of web applications.

Rails is currently a very mature and feature complete framework.

It's the ideal one if you're the only dev for your project because you get so many things already baked-in the framework that you'd only need to deeply care about specific stuff.

I won't say any NodeJS framework isn't good enough but in my experience with NodeJS frameworks you have to code a lot of the things Rails already provides. There's many people in Twitter and IRL asking for a "Rails for JavaScript" framework.

And you know? In the early stages of any project we have to validate it first with real users/customers. With Rails you can get to production real quick and fast.

I'm going to mention some of the features you get from day 1 when you run rails new app_name:

• File uploading with Active Storage
• Rich text editor with Action Text
• Emailing with Action Mailer
• ORM, migrations, validations with Active Record
• Web sockets with Action Cable
• Internationalization
• Modern frontend stuff with Webpacker

and more.

The JavaScript community is on its moment, growing and gathering more people everyday but the Rails community is also a big one and there's always going to be a Rails developer to hire whenever you're ready to hire someone.

I suggest you to go with Rails because is a good choice, gives you less things to worry about and it's a very good and mature framework.

I hate to admit it, because I loved my time with Rails (and I still love the framework), I have a hard time justifying new Rails applications these days. Core team has made some tragic design decisions, and developers just don't perceive it as being "cool" any more. The latter is a terrible metric for which to base a technology decision, but I think you'll find it more difficult to recruit additional engineers if you choose Ruby on Rails.

Without knowing too much of the details, Node/Express (ideally with Typescript) seems like a better solution here, given you'll be building out the front-end in Vue or React. It might be worth looking at NestJS, as it's the closest I've seen to a well-formed opinionated framework on the Node side of things. We're also fans of Objection ORM.

I hope that's helpful!

I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs

Hi Max, it sounds like that you are proficient in both stacks and probably have a higher expertise in Rails (correct me if I am wrong) and since you are the only dev on a project, a good argument that comes to mind is probably the velocity and maturity (enterprise grade, battle tested in production) that Rails provide with proven success stories in the tech industry such as Airbnb, Stripes, Shopify to name a few. You can also make the argument that Rails is great to run the backend and React+Vue (and nodejs for tooling) is ideal for the front-end development (see or find companies example that use both). You can also build and show a prototype using both and share your experience which could help you find and forge the selling points to those non tech savvy folks, why not.

Eventually, are you going to have other developers on your project? if yes then you will need to take in account, onboarding and ramp up to contribution time when they are hired.

IMHO, I am not a fan of the debate Rails vs Nodejs, they are just tools at the disposal of the developer it's just a matter of figuring out what makes the most sense.

Let me know if you wanna discuss further, happy to help out!

ps: markdown preview on stack share... no good.

Rails has advantages over node.js (specifically express) when working a more complicated backend. While Express has some speed advantages to Rails, this is mitigated if your software is more CPU intensive.

Use the language which works well for the developers you have or have available. If you're starting, building a first iteration is far more important than worrying about what language might be best to solve a problem you may never have.

When hiring, look for developers, not "node developers" or "java developers" having people who recognise and are willing to adapt means you can have the flexibility you will need to solve as-yet unforeseen issues. Hire people who are wed to a specific language and you will be bound to that language, regardless of whether it's most appropriate or not.

For online banking, it'll be less computation intensive and more data intensive. So, Rails will be better than Python. I'll not recommend Node.js as it's not as scalable as those. If I had to choose indepently I would took Go.

Typescript reduces many errors and makes potentially big app more maintainable. For banking app typed language is must have, so if not node than it could be anything typed, but not python or ruby. Also you can search benchmarks by yourself - ruby is the slowest language in the world, python comes next, javascript is on top of interpreted languages by speed.

HI Shivam, If you the only person who is going to develop the full application then I will suggest you to go for Node.js because you will have to deal with one language only i.e. Javascript. And if you are thinking about scaling then do not worry. Nodejs with mongodb make good application. Capital One bank, Paypal, Linkedin and so on companies shifted themselves to Nodejs. Even if you go for Ruby, it has GVL which again makes it work in single thead. If you want to manage concurrent requests in Ruby then you have to manage by introducing Rubinius/jRuby. If we talk about the deployment of Nodejs, it require less resources as compare to other. I have deployed inventory solution right now using Reactjs with Node.js stack and it is pretty much good. I have also deployed apps in Ruby as well. However, node is fast as compare to Ruby and you can scale it easily. I am not saying Ruby is bad. I work in Ruby as I told you above. But these are the real facts.

You can checkout this link :- https://softwarebrothers.co/blog/companies-that-use-node-js/

Since it's a banking app, I'd advice you go with Python for the backend because of the data analysis you'd be doing in your app. I see you doing some data analysis since it's a banking app. Python is a powerful language for data analysis. And for web, yes I'd advice Node with React, and for mobile, Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Don't even try going hybrid for this kind of application. It's best going native.

As others mentioned, the problem domain is around data. From my experience, data means strongly typed entities. It might be good however to start off with a dynamic language such as Python (with Django) just to build a prototype, but once the models have been proved to be valid I'd go with statically typed language such as java/Go (I prefer Go but that's a whole different conversation) as you get compile time guarantees for type safety.

An alternative (or addition) to all of the above is the use of 'strong protocols', such as Protocol Buffers, Avro, Thrift and the likes. In this case you get type safety and stability between communicating backend services, while deciding and changing on whatever backend service language you want. That goes to say that your problem is not related to programming language decision but to a much profound understanding of what's important for the business to be created and be valuable.

As a general note, I don't think you should go, if you've got commercial aspirations, with any language that you'd have hard recruiting people who actually know what their doing. In Israel it would mean take Kotlin out of the equation

The reason why companies are switching to nodeJS is because it unifies all development under a single language.

If you are a one man team you can start developing anywhere on the stack without the overhead of switching languages at each layer. If you have a large team, your DBAs, your core service team, your application team can all read each others code.

You can build a serverless backend using nodeJS and cloud services( AWS, Azure, etc.) that is extremely scalable. A front end framework (ReactJS(Web/mobile), ReactNativeJS(mobile optimized) all in Javascript. If you need to optimize performance for mobile further you can contract an iOS Developer to build in Swift or an Android developer to build it Kotlin and give them keys to use your nodeJS apis.

node is convenient.

You should not go with react,kotlin and swift those are very colourful languages but java ,node.js etc are colourful yet they have depth. You should only go with kotlin if you want to use android studio it is highly compatible. So its your choice . May you choose the best