Re:“Start Rails 5 development”
by jordanthoms on Saturday November 29, 2014 @04:56AM
(#8673476)
People always seem to prefer Sinatra over Rails for building a SPA backend, because 'rails is overkill'. Then they add Active Record, some autoloader implementation, rspec, caching, sidekiq etc and you end up with a cobbled together version of rails essentially. Rails-API is really nice here, strips out the things you truly don't need for a API in rails but keeps all the other infrastructure.
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It works both ways though: I suspect that maybe most people on starting a rails project rip out half the gemfile as soon as 'rails new' has finished. Or they have their own skeleton projects with preferences already sorted out (rails api being a high point of the genre). Deconstructing a web framework isn't necessarily better than reconstructing one.
I'd beg to differ: at the very least it provides hints and conventions on common, useful, well-integrated gems. The Sinatra apps I've seen that had gotten a bit fatter over time tended to be all over the place, dependencies and quality wise (some good, mind you); whereas the deconstructed rails apps tended to be very similar, and easy for other developers to get up to speed with.
It's a small advantage, but it's enough for me to prefer it.
Yeah, I'm partly playing devil's advocate: for my day job I work with node, doing microservice-y stuff; on my own time, I prefer working with a Django or Rails type framework.
I appreciate the benefits of a 'batteries included' approach when, realistically, anything I build on my own is not going to have to horizontally scale across 50 EC2 boxes, although some of Rails's choices in terms of batteries are peculiar to me.