Like others have mentioned, this is an apple vs orange comparison. Ruby & Rails is not the same as NodeJS. A popular framework which you probably used with NodeJS is Express, that as its documentation states tries to be a minimal framework for creating NodeJS servers. I agree that something like Rails has its own benefits, but I can't really take seriously this type of complaining when it's directed at the wrong thing. You're complaining about frameworks, not NodeJS the runtime. And NodeJS is not fixed to some specific framework that forces you to do things in one way. And thank god for that.

There was some initial burden I admit with NodeJS but I have at least got to the productive plateau (with TypeScript). Once you figure out the pattern that works for you, it gets simpler. The inventing part is what drives most developers crazy, and it did for me too. It's perhaps too non-restrictive but well, hopefully there's somebody in your company showing you the right way. And you don't want to install every basic package by hand? But have them already included? You understand that adds quite a bit of bloat to projects that have no need for eg CORS or body-parser. And "code hacked together" is only a problem with bad programmers, you can get working and secure code with NodeJS, it just needs thought put into it. And yes, Rails has advantage with this but I think you made that argument clear.

Instead of making the argument "NodeJS is bad" you should aim that at the frameworks of NodeJS. SailJS was a good attempt at Rails but it's way too restrictive with its patterns (and sadly the documentation is not good). Deno looks promising and I hope people will be building better frameworks on top of that.

I think the point is more that a Rails style framework does not exist in Node. There are a few projects that have attempted to be like Rails, but none that appear to have succeeded in any real way.

In the Ruby ecosystem, Rails will get you very far. In Python, Django will do the same. PHP –> Laravel. Scala –> Play.

JS does not have an equivalent, and the community seems to actively dislike the approach. That's fine, a monolithic framework approach isn't always the best option, but in the Node ecosystem it's not even an option on the table.

Well your argument is a lot more nuanced than the original comment I responded to. And I agree, it is burdensome especially for people not familiar with NodeJS that there isn't a one-size-fits-all framework. I don't really know the main causes why it happened, but I guess people felt satisfied with Express & Koa though it left, and still leaves, a lot for programmers to do by themselves.

Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say SailJS to make it work. Nevertheless my experience with ORMs or scaffold generators has been that I always feel they are one custom use case away from turning from time-savers to time-sinks. When you write your own SQL and implement your own models/services or whatever abstraction you decide to use, you get a much deeper understanding of what is going on than just trusting your framework to do it for you. And is that good or bad? That is certainly a topic for debate.

> Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say...

This is interesting to me, because Ruby has Sinatra (and others) that compare well to Express/Koa. Python has Flask which is very popular, as well as a number of fantastic alternatives. These ecosystems have very mature, well designed, small web frameworks, but still people choose the larger frameworks in these ecosystems, and all of the frameworks get good maintenance.

I wonder if it's a cultural thing in the JS ecosystem. Maybe the ease of publishing a package creates a race to the bottom in terms of package scope, which makes it so difficult to sustain larger more all-encompassing packages.

I've worked with Ruby+Rails/Sinatra/Cuba, Python+Flask/Django/Bottle/Sanic, and Node+Express, and when I was in the Node ecosystem I sometimes really wanted that Rails/Django equivalent – not always, but the lack of it would cause me to avoid Node for large backend projects.

SailsJS killed itself. It was a flaming pile of garbage in terms of it's design with an ultra toxic community to boot.

I am a big fan of Knex for just this reason. It's not an ORM, just a migration manager and query builder. It makes easy stuff easy, and for complex stuff it gets out of your way.

If you need complex relationship models, ObjectionJS sits on top and will auto-manage relationship tables and all that nasty stuff for you.

Express is not a framework. It's a library that just lets you set up routes, and a pretty minimal one at that. Calling express a framework would be like calling the routes.rb file in Rails a framework - it's not. It's a small part of a framework. NodeJS the runtime is great (although the number of deprecated functions in core is depressing). Node the ecosystem is a nightmare.

I'd echo the sentiments of the other developers here. Building a backend or full-stack app in Node is painful at every step of the journey. You're writing basically everything by hand, while using sub-standard orms and route handlers.

I've decided I like React enough to continue using it. But I'll be sticking to Rails for the backend.

This totally misses the point which is that there is no equivalent option in the node ecosystem. Ruby would be some toy project for enthusiasts if Rails hadn't come along and given huge numbers of developers a compelling case to put it in production.

It's not clear to me why people make this choice with node when after you choose it you are left to solve solved problems from scratch. Chosing node is the explicit choice to enter an ecosystem that does not have good cohesive solutions to basic problems. To do things that could be done easily with a framework like rails the very hard way.

Yes I totally agree with you, it's not a fair comparaison.

My point was indeed that there is no real Rails equivalent in the Node ecosystem. Something mature which is supported by a large community over many years. Django, Spring Boot, Laravel, Phoenix play such a role in each of their language.

In Node you have to come with your own set of libraries, structure and convention, which is not the most efficient way to start and maintain a project. I agree that more senior programmers might avoid most of the common mistakes, but still you might spend time discussing little details such as structure and conventions. Frameworks such as Rails make at least some of those discussions irrelevant and allow you to quickly move on.

Well I just replied to a comment before you, but we are definitely on the same page here. It's a mess when you start your first NodeJS backend, especially if there's nobody to help you. You'll probably make some terrible mistakes in your design that have to be later refactored. It's a downside but hopefully things get better. Maybe Deno will give us a fresh start.

You're right, it's not a fair comparison. Because there is no fair comparison. That's the entire point. There is no fair comparison between Ruby on Rails and anything in the NodeJS world because nothing like Rails exists in the NodeJS world.

That was the entire point.

This right here. This is my main beef with node. I love js and the ecosystem can be amazing, but just give me something that I can use to focus on the business problems.

> Deno looks promising and I hope people will be building better frameworks on top of that.

Deno is not a framework.

> building better frameworks on top of that

As in building frameworks on top of Deno, like Express/Koa/etc are built on top of Node; Node is not a framework either

I can totally relate on this.

In the end I think Rails and Node have different purposes. I would still use Node for proxy-style servers. Something with a small and focused scope which has to scale.

For business intensive apps with a large scope, Rails-like frameworks are still way more productive and robust even if they are less trendy for the moment.

The current frontend state is another story indeed. Frameworks like Ember tried to bring the same Rails-like structure to the frontend world but it isn't as popular and trendy as React for whatever reason. I think it's very costly for frontend teams to reinvent a coherent structure, convention etc for every new project. At least React has brought the same way of thinking in the frontend industry.

I'm new to the Rails ecosystem but from what I've seen and also with many years using Django (which is very similar), I would agree with your assessment regarding Rails. The complex monolith that speeds up development very much has its place, especially at the beginning of a project. You can always cut it apart later as needed.

Regarding Node.js, however, I would say the pain is not worth it. For the same purpose I would now reach for Go (for networking stuff) or Rust (for high performance). This is after several years in a Node shop.

What about Elixir? Dynamically typed like Node and functional.

Not a very easy sell to management, unfortunately. I'm using it for a personal project though, mainly thanks to Phoenix.

GitHub is the #65 most visited website in the world. Is that "webscale" enough for you?

It’s exactly what I find so great about Ember (beyond just preferring a true templating language for front ends)

React bringing the “same way of thinking” in the front end industry may be true now, but it definitely was not the case for many years. I saw three or four react projects and they were architected very differently, with different routing, different state patterns, different approaches to updating backend state, different build systems, etc.

That's because React is a UI library, not a monolithic batteries-included framework. Amazing to me how often this is misunderstood. React's relatively narrow focus is one of its strengths.

I think this is also a weakness as mentioned in the previous comment. React is dead simple and has a limited scope... but now what happens when I went to pull in external data, use react as a router, or manage complex data? Well, now authors have to decide which libraries to use in conjunction React, which can vary wildly from project to project. This is something that Rails and Ember has tried to avoid.

Agreed; of course there are tradeoffs! "What happens.." is that you can use Mobx instead of redux bc it's easier to reason about. You can have some preferred way of doing things, and let React be a component-level implementation detail. Pros and cons abound in choosing a bells-and-whistles, batteries-included framework vs taking on the overhead -- and upside -- of composing a set of preferred libraries or tools. I never said "React is always a better choice than X." I said "it's not apples:apples to compare them directly". For which I got downvoted? sigh

I didn't downvote you! I still don't have that ability yet ;).

No worries! I didn't mean to imply you'd downvoted me. :)

meta: I won't mind _this_ comment being downvoted since we're so far afield from the OP, but it's worth it to me to clarify intent in responding to a friendly peer.

Rails scales OK. You can't run Netflix on Rails on a single server, but it scales OK.

I doubt that you can run Netflix on any single server no matter of the webframework. Besides that Netflix itself is a Rails user for many applications (most of them for internal purposes).

It seems the bottleneck with netflix would be storage requirements and number of PCIe lanes for extra NICs. I really don't see how, "This framework couldn't run a site that accounts for up to 40% of internet traffic at peak hours on one server; clearly it's terrible!" I like scaling as much as the next guy, but Pareto dictates (as does experice) that most stuff is simple business logic with an interface.

Definitely agree with this. I have been switching from developing in ruby into Node 2 years ago as I thought this was "the new thing" for web apps. Now I just want to move away from Node. Large scale Node applications looks like 20 years ago, copy and paste all over the place, cheap libraries, no developer happiness, you have to reinvent the wheels, etc.

Why did Node become so popular if this is the case?

It's very easy to build small things with (small API servers, proxies, tools for example), development of those things is quick, the development feedback cycle is extremely rapid, JS is a bit of a lingua franca (for better or for worse), it is extremely easy to get set up (again, for simple things). In turn this created a huge community, which in turn triggered a virtuous (?) circle, and gave easily-installable libraries for almost anything you can think of. It also should be said that it is good at what it does. The reactor pattern works well in specific use cases and is easy to understand -- which I guess is the main cause of it being used as a general purpose hammer. Yes, it has glaring issues, but the "silly JS programmers with their toy language wanted to write backend servers" meme is a bit annoying.

Because there are an awful lot of JavaScript programmers out there, and Node let them apply the skills they already had on the server side for the first time [1].

[1] Technically, Node didn't invent server-side JavaScript; Netscape's application servers supported a version of the same idea in the '90s, back when Netscape was still a thing. But there was a long period where JS was effectively ghettoized as a language for browser scripting only, and Node is what broke it back out of that.

"WebScale"

and

a generation of programmers that grew up on Javascript thinking it would be cool to write JS on the server too.

I believe for small projects it can be interesting, you can have an instance up using 50 MB ram. Also the language is widely used. JS is used in the frontend so they believe it's great for the backend also because you "reuse" the code. In my experience close no code is reused from frontend to the backend and vice versa.

Laziness I think. People wanted to use the same language for the backend as the frontend rather than picking their tools based on what does the job the best.

Agreed that picking the right tool for the job is essential. But you might want to revisit your assumptions about the benefits of baking in such a hard separation of "frontend" and "backend". See Gatsby for example.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion but I personally think a hard separation is required because the frontend and backend development solve different problems. Sure they're related but it's like the distinction between SQL and backend web service code. Sure there are tools like ORMs however they never compare well to well written SQL from engineers who understand databases. Likewise understanding the distinction of requirements on the frontend vs backend is just as important.

It's funny because many frontend web developers are keen to point out the distinction between Javascript, HTML and CSS and the importance of why HTML and CSS are distinctly different mark ups. Yet will then discuss frontend and backend code as if it's the same beast.

Maybe this opinion is an age related thing though. I've been publishing websites since the 1990s ('93 I think my first site went live). So I've always seen frontend and backend as separate entities - as they were for most of the web's evolution.

I think you misunderstood me, or we're talking past each other a bit here; I've been at it professionally since about 1998, so any difference in perspective is unlikely to be age-related -- at least in the sense of depth of experience with the tradition.

"The right tool for the job", yes, of course -- but why would you insist that a particular set of traditional architectural constraints must needs be permanently enforced at the level of language and runtime? Being locked into a "3-tier architecture, server-side" perspective is a common trap for many senior developers. As is dismissing the real (and amazing) progress and expansion of possibilities inherent in the accelerating changes in front-end technology. Of course there are ignorant juniors. Of course the signal:noise ratio in the world of modern web and mobile dev is suboptimal; there's so much churn and noise and froth. But also progress, evolution, improvement. To write it all off, clinging to comforting notions that what we mastered a decade or more ago is the best -- let alone only -- way to do it?

"The difficulty lies not in grasping the new ideas, but letting go of the old."

I don't disagree that Javascript has evolved into a first class language now but it hasn't always been. Your rhetoric - while lacking a lot of technical content - are valid for the current state of play but not the question being asked. Back in the early days of Node it was complete garbage but people stuck with it because they wanted a single language to rule them all and browsers wouldn't support anything beyond JS (despite how crappy JS was back then). So the reasons node gained any momentum in the early days was simply because:

1. it was too difficult to get any other language first class support for browser scripting (the reasons for that are obvious)

2. frontend developers wanted to reuse the same language for front and back (often because they simply didn't want to learn another language).

Let's also circle back to my point about the right tools for the job. Javascript has always made some sense for frontend development - it might not be the best designed language from an academic perspective but it suited browser scripting well enough to get the job done. Plus in the early days we didn't need anything particularly pretty anyway. But JS definitely did not suite backend development when Node was first being deployed. In fact I'm pretty sure Node was just a hobby project where some guys thought "Chrome's JS VM can run headless - lets see where this takes us." (this part may be incorrect but I have a vague recollection of that being the case). However without tools like Docker nor any decent way of running parallel execution stacks (nor a first class web server supporting Node ala mod_perl / mod_php / phpfpm / et al) it meant Javascript was simply not a good language for backend development for a relatively long time because the tooling wasn't there and the language lacked the primitives to compensate (like how Python, Perl and Ruby could all self host their own threaded web server).

These days Javascript still doesn't support threading but it does have other primitives that do a reasonable job of compensating. Plus with tools like Docker, you can always scale sideways when your application failed to scale upwards. The tooling around JS has improves, the language itself has improved and the way we host web sites has also evolved (eg cloud environments running containers vs VMs or even bare metal servers running web servers written in C++ which spawn language VMs as separate processes). The whole landscape of backend development had to change as well as Javascript itself before it really because a first class backend language.

So to summarise, yes you're right to and extent. But you answer a subtly different question: "why is node still popular?" rather than the question I was answering: "why did it become popular?"

Ironically it was the popularity that gave node the momentum to improve; rather than node initially being good that gave it popularity (though obviously node improving would have had a snowball effect on node's popularity as well).

Right on -- we're mostly in agreement.

Definitely a fair point about addressing the original question. IME, node _became_ popular in part because it allowed web developers to start solving problems themselves, directly, using a language they already knew [albeit a kind of terrible/problematic language at the time], to do things like CLI scripting for automation of tedious FE dev workflow tasks (a la Grunt and bower), or standing up dirt-simple web servers. At that point the floodgates had opened. With the concomitant (and ongoing) shift in architectures toward executing more and more of the application on the client side (with hugely popular services like gmail and google maps demonstrating the power of "Ajax"), the rest became almost inevitable. With Node, like Javascript in general, the quality followed the popularity, as world-class engineers set to fixing and improving what was available to work with, to shape it into something better-suited to the task. The process might even be ~akin to selective adaptation in biological evolution.

I like how you've phrased that. It's a lot better (and less opinionated) than what I put :)

What you're describing is just bad code. That happens in any runetime. This is not specific to Node.

I agree, but from my observation bad code is more significantly more widespread in Node. The tooling is just incomplete by default, you have to setup yourself. Further the projects structure is completely different on every project (and typically not nicely done).

Speaking of PHP, I'm really enjoying using Laravel as of late. I'm not super experienced in web development, but the Laravel experience is my favorite so far. The Laracasts tutorial series is also top-notch. I really wish other projects had official video tutorials like them.

Completely differently origin stories.

nodejs is JavaScript bindings for libev. http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html

Other comments listed npm modules with Rails equivalents, so I won't repeat.

The one thing I got out of nodejs is becoming reacquainted with working closer to the metal. Minimalism for some HTTP endpoints (what the kids call REST) can be fun.

Rails, PHP, nodejs et al, J2EE, etc. I've got no dog in this fight. Each is uniquely terrible. I hate them all.

Have a look at Sails.js. While not perfect, its highly influenced by Rails

https://sailsjs.com/

I'm currently working with it for a project atm, I can not recommend it, it's ORM is pretty bad, cutting corners wherever possible, but the worst thing about it is its documentation it is badly redacted and relies a lot on examples rather than laying out the possibilities of what you can do with a certain part of sails, issues also go unattended for a long while and there's not much of a community surrounding it.

Just my two cents, I would be happy to hear some success stories from it though.

I worked with sails about three years ago. It was a decent experience, but Sails 1.0 has been years underway and seems like a major rewrite of the whole thing. I don't really think a great many people use Sails anymore, and I don't think I would recommend it either.

Sails is and has always been a subpar framework with a toxic community. The one time I tried to use it in production I regretted it big time.

What's the current state of Sails? I first heard about it 5 or 6 years ago but haven't heard much else about the project in ages.

I worked with node for 5 years and never came across anyone using sails. That might be a symptom of the node community but last I saw it still wasn’t very good.

I basically agree, but there are some people fighting the good fight against Node's awful ecosystem.

- Parcel is like if Webpack were a build system and not a programming language to create a build system with. - Vue has good set of solutions. Nuxt is a nice version of "here's what you're probably going to want, already glued together." - If Deno ever becomes a thing, it will be cool.

It feels like maybe if we're lucky, in five years, there will be an ecosystem for modern JS that doesn't suck.

It's too bad that Node.JS is mostly used as a scaffolding and glue language for web frameworks, while where it really shines is as a replacement for a systems language. You sacrifice 4x performance to get better safety, less development time, easier code, easier deployment, and a more open and friendly ecosystem.

Replacement for a systems language? How are dynamically-typed callbacks, as in Node's fs library, in any way comparable with, say, go routines or good old procedural C++? Async is the worst programming model for building systems.

The Node.JS libraries also have Sync (not async) alternatives. But everything is async by default. JS/Node is single threaded, but supports multi process concurrency with message passing and sharing of sockets.

I personally prefer callback convention, but it's not the only paradigm. Primises/Futures, and async/await is also very popular.

Node.JS makes you think async, which has a learning curve, but I prefer that over multi threading locks and data races.

Go is also great. But I think JavaScript is much easier.

You're comparing a runtime environment to a framework.

Use Angular on the client and something server side in Node and you're set.

Use Typescript and you'll be able to refactor easily too.

Nobody uses just React+Express w/o TS for something serious.

"Nobody uses just React+Express w/o TS for something serious." Hardly. Just search for "(react.js or reactjs) (nodejs or node.js)" on indeed.co.uk. 441 results. Now append "-typescript" to the same search. 378 results. It appears Typescript hasn't yet taken over the world.

Most companies using typescript don’t advertise for typescript developers and will simply look for JS decelopers, because the belief is that anyone should be able to transition from JS to TS so why limit your scope.

Where's your evidence for this?

Maybe I should have said "... and has a good time." :)

>You're comparing a runtime environment to a framework

Yup. Because there is no Rails-like framework in NodeJS.

>Use Angular on the client and something server side

That "something server side" is the entire problem. In 2006 if you're writing a web app, the answer was Ruby on Rails. In 2019 the answer is "Angular or React or Vue on the front end and something server side". No generators, no scaffolds, no auto-generated migrations, no opinions, no ORM, no standardized way of doing anything, no naming scheme, no guidance. Just "something server side".

If I said "use Ruby to create a web app" you'd load up Rails. If I said "use Python" you'd load up Django. If I said "use NodeJS", you'd just... list all your NPM packages?

Yeah, you're right. I don't know why that is. You can properly engineer stuff in Node but there are no "rails" to guide you so I get that more projects will be a mess as compared to Rails or Django.

To be honest I wouldn't suggest Node as a solution for your backend which is probably why I said "something server side" because when I think Node I just think of a thin API wrapper that uses an RPC to call your Java services or what-have-you. The only reason you even do that is to give the FE people something to mesh data together from services for their clients while you can keep backend APIs generic. Luckily graphql will start to replace that convention.

Makes me want to build such a framework in TS... but why would I do that when I can just use Spring. :)

If you just use TS without really understanding how it can help you and your particular problems you're solving, it can be more of a burden to refactoring than a saviour. Type systems are not a panacea for refactoring difficulties.

How so? I wouldn't use it for a tiny app, but for something where you're thinking far into the future I would.

Keep in mind, at my current company we don't use it (giant 5 year old AngularJS codebase) but I would love to.

You don't even have to use it fully. Just mark your function arguments and you're already saving headaches.

I agree that TypeScript is great, but I've seen it used to establish its own kind of technical debt is what I'm trying to say. If you establish types for your poorly designed application it will only entrench bad design deeper. So, throwing a type system at that problem isn't actually helpful at all in cases like that.

I agree though that using TS and not worrying about actually defining types can be great. I do think you can run into sort of wandering inference bugs or cases where other peoples' types can be poorly defined, but that's a rare problem in my experience and well worth the benefits you get otherwise.

Anyway, I'm definitely not trashing TypeScript or suggesting no one should use it or anything. I almost always start new projects with it.

I think I get your point.

I think it's better to compare Loopback/Express with Rails instead of NodeJS.

From what I've seen of Loopback's verbosity I think the best comparison would be with Spring. For some reason every time the corporates get their hands on a dynamically-typed language they try their best to turn it into Java/C#. Facebook did it with PHP and now Microsoft are at it with Javascript.

Hi how are? Why dont you give a try on kiwi serve. Its a framewrok I develop t work with node in a better way.

You can check here www.kiwi-server.com.

Of course It's open source