Should I switch to RoR from Laravel?
Hello there,
I'm a web developer and using Laravel for day-to-day life.
It's been around 5 years of developing with Laravel. But I feel neither comfortable nor confident using Laravel.
And I feel insecure whenever I think about PHP's future.
Lately, I was thinking about giving RoR a try. That's why I've signed up here.
The questions I'm going to ask may seems a bit awkward but I have to.
I want to know, exactly what RoR can offer me apart from other MVCs?
I'm not much familiar with Ruby, but I hold a CS degree and I know stuff about coding and data structures.
So, does it worth it to switch from Laravel to RoR? And if it does, then what should be my step to learn the MVC perfectly?
I know, there are lots of articles and answers to the questions out there, but I want to hear it from those who are already using RoR on daily basis.
Hope you didn't find my query offending. I'm sorry if it seems offending to you, I never intended to.
Thanks for your time.
Peace.
I did Laravel for 2.5 years and had similar worries. I stopped using it for a year because I got handed a pretty weird Node and React JS project in my new job. I missed programming by convention and the MVC framework way of doing things. A few months ago I got the chance to hire more people to the dev team (which was only me). We decided that we needed to take a different route to build what the company needed. One of the guys was pretty familiar with Jumpstart and RoR and since I knew MVC we decided to use RoR for the new project. I’ve started using RoR at end of December 2020 and so far I’ve been loving it, it wasn’t a hard transition since I knew the way things worked but of course the syntax was different. Got to say that the team synergy and the involvement with the Go Rails community had help us a lot throughout the project while figuring stuff out. We had the chance to attend to Railsconf 2021 and the future of RoR seems pretty bright. That has been my experience so far.
Preface: I am a full-stack dev coming from PHP and the Drupal community. I've only been using RoR for a little while, but it fits perfectly into the needs of the project I'm working on. Laravel probably would be fine as well.
And I feel insecure whenever I think about PHP's future.
I would not be concerned about this. PHP 8 was just released. PHP is adding more async/fiber support. PHP is fast enough...etc. The Drupal community I am leaving is, in fact, shrinking...but I can still get a job "doing Drupal" since I have 7 - 8 years and people think that means something. Truthfully, I got left behind in Drupal 7 and no place I worked could make the transition to D8/9 effectively so I don't consider being an expert anymore.
One other main thing is the heavy use of DSLs in Ruby. I'm not sure how you'd accomplish those in PHP, but I suppose they are akin to an interface? I'm still trying to wrap my head around the DSL approach vs. whatever the equivalent in PHP is.
Both Ruby and PHP are adding more concurrency and static typing features. Both languages are moving forward.
I want to know, exactly what RoR can offer me apart from other MVCs?
I feel like many ideas that are in Laravel (and other Rails-inspired frameworks) came from Rails. The most interesting feature to watch now, IMHO, is the whole "HTML over the wire" movement which I believe started with Phoenix LiveView...and Phoenix seems to be born out of Rails too...but Rails has a couple of options for this type of work.
Laravel has LiveWire, but it still uses AJAX requests and not WebSockets...as far as I can tell. Plus, I think Alpine.js has security issues with eval...or I read something like that. I would compare Laravel to RoR for this type of stuff. God knows I want to use it instead of React and all the frontend pain for my minuscule dynamic UI needs.
And if it does, then what should be my step to learn the MVC perfectly?
Go forth and build, my son! I like to try and build apps with different use cases and compare. GoRails videos are great for seeing how an experienced person would do things. I also liked looking at templates. https://github.com/markets/awesome-ruby#rails-application-generators For some reason, Jumpstart isn't on that list, but you can find it within GoRails. I would look at the Awesome Ruby list.
Hope you didn't find my query offending. I'm sorry if it seems offending to you, I never intended to.
Hopefully, no one else thinks that either...and this is a huge component for me: the community. I felt a bit off in the Laravel community, and I didn't enjoy my interactions with Taylor Otwell.
I also despise the fact that you install Laravel and are instantly marketed "Taylor and friends" services. If I wanted to build a SaaS/PaaS with Laravel, I would be afraid that Taylor would just steal my idea, put it on the Laravel homepage, and make $$. That's what I felt Nova did to Backpack...but I could be totally misreading that relationship. Anywhoo, I generally don't see marketing on "hello world" pages with other frameworks.
At the end of the day, there's always a cost to switching up your bread and butter tech stack of choice. The job market can be quite cruel in that regard. If I was using Laravel in PHP and not Drupal, I'm not sure if I'd look to switch, as my PHP experience is closer to what interviewers want to see. Laravel seems pretty close to RoR, and Laravel also seems to be gaining popularity.
@Ben it's nice to hear your opinion and thanks a lot for this. Hope you find your path more satisfying with RoR.
@Alex Finnarn
Oh my god, that was a thorough explanation for each and every one of my questions.
How can I thank you mate?
So far, I have found this community so interactive and helpful. Hope my journey with the community will be great.
Besides, I'm considering switching from Laravel to RoR from now on.
I owe you.
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