Rails is probably one of the best ways to not waste time. I knew they had some of this capability but I wasn't sure if they generated the whole controller, fully hooked up to the models, too.
The only thing that turns me off about Rails and .NET is that it's a big learning curve _because_ the projects are so feature complete. Since I haven't worked professionally in either of them, I haven't been able to get myself to learn either well enough to do rapid prototyping.
Agreed, this is a real problem. I recently did a test. I have about a year of rails experience but it was so long ago that I forgot most things and had to look them up. I also wrote quite a bit of node/express but it was in the node 0.10 days so I had a lot of catch-up to do.
I started a new app and I got a basic Users and Sessions model with endpoints running (I like this test because dealing with passwords and API tokens requires writing some code instead of generating it all, but also leverages libraries).
These numbers aren't useful by themselves since you don't know the details of the work I did, but they may be useful side by side:
Express/TypeScript: Took me about 24 to 30 hours to get it all implemented. I started with no ORM (node-postgres) then tried out Knex, then settled on Slonik.js. Because of that I had to re-write some stuff a few times. However, in a bare-bones "framework" this is part of the penalty.
Rails: Took about 10 hours (mostly reading documentation and Michael Hartl's book).
I think I prefer the Node approach simply because I know exactly what is going on under that hood. That said however, if I were a second developer coming into the code base I'd prefer the Rails approach because I'd have to learn "the framework" anyway and a widespread standardized one like Rails would be preferable to learn IMHO.
In conclusion: My numbers are highly individualized and don't tell the whole story of course. In related news, I actually threw both of them away and went back to Elixir/Phoenix, my third love. I'm quite happy there at the moment, and I don't anticipate moving again.
I think your comment about Rails being more accessible since other programmers would probably know it seems to be true of any framework but (anecdotally) I question whether the hypothesis works in real life. Any fairly complex application built using frameworks seems similar at first but then there’s all kinds of custom hacks and non-idiomatic code that needs to be explained anyway. I guess at least most programmers will be familiar with the shape of the code but how import is that?
I suspect that frameworks are ideal for coding boot camps where one doesn’t need to understand the details of what frameworks do as much to be productive. And for boot amp grads perhaps a familiar framework makes the code more accessible? IDK, I’m speculating.
You make some excellent points. With small apps I find I can drop into a rails codebase and be productive in minutes, but with any complex application there's enough hacks that it's almost never true. I think the framework/rails approach doesn't really do much for complex apps. Just my anecdata as well.
If you would like to explore more TypeScript ORM Libraries TypeORM comes to mind, and recently Zapatos made it into the frontpage and although it's new it looks like a nice simple but powerful alternative, much more close to raw SQL than TypeORM's clearly abstract layer/magic sause.
just my 2 cents
Also about more general web frameworks like rails and not ORM's I personally use NextJS with TypeScript, like Ant.Design for it's react components library, use Jest for testing + Eslint + Prettier.
That makes the most of my IDE, it's like having a second pair of eyes behind you in Real Time telling you every typo between Types, Linting, and other VSCode extension goodies...
Thank you. I have been eyeing NextJS quite seriously. I'll be needing to build a non-trivial frontend application pretty soon and I've been really wondering if I should got the NextJS route.
No, sadly I have not, I can't vouch for it's production readiness for large-scale projects by telling myself first hand accounts of it, but I think you should checkout their latest blogposts/releases (Instant Reload, Dynamic Routing, etc)
I would just start with nice defaults like TypeScript, etc, which might help maintain a sane codebase in a large project.
But nextjs is really flexible, I find myself using it as my frontend -hammer-, maybe you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I've felt more productive coding with it than others!
The only thing that turns me off about Rails and .NET is that it's a big learning curve _because_ the projects are so feature complete. Since I haven't worked professionally in either of them, I haven't been able to get myself to learn either well enough to do rapid prototyping.