This gets a hard disagree from me. I _really tried_ to give the whole node + react approach a go because, to me, GraphQL & all the things you can generate with it is _magical_ (especially fine-grained authz with app-specific graphql directives - beautiful!). Singularly, the availability of xstate to replicate business processes identically between api & ui. So useful! So undervalued!
Then I ran into finding myself spending time on background jobs, authentication management (not the basic functionality but tinkering & modification past password reset / session management, blacklist/expiry if jwt's, etc), file upload integrations, db management (when not utilizing prisma or hasura), etc. High variety of effort spent on tasks where I found myself asking the question, "why am I having to work on this...?"
I still ship more in Rails. It's still a better tool for most things. There are cases where I'll reach to node when needs are simple and short-lived. Other tools have the potential to exceed Rails (and I hope they do), but they're not there yet.
One of my least favorite things about Rails, & one of the best ideas to emerge in the past decade or so, is react. The componentization of views driven by state is such a useful approach. Rails has historically had a has & belong to many relationship between controller contexts and views, which is essentially global and easy to get super confusing. React (and now browser-react aka web components) provide a better way of tackling this problem.
And... they hook up directly to my cache? They provide a great way of broadcasting dom updates directly? They interoperate with web components no problem where I need high fidelity interaction/performance? etc etc. Rails... has done it again.
Then I ran into finding myself spending time on background jobs, authentication management (not the basic functionality but tinkering & modification past password reset / session management, blacklist/expiry if jwt's, etc), file upload integrations, db management (when not utilizing prisma or hasura), etc. High variety of effort spent on tasks where I found myself asking the question, "why am I having to work on this...?"
I still ship more in Rails. It's still a better tool for most things. There are cases where I'll reach to node when needs are simple and short-lived. Other tools have the potential to exceed Rails (and I hope they do), but they're not there yet.
One of my least favorite things about Rails, & one of the best ideas to emerge in the past decade or so, is react. The componentization of views driven by state is such a useful approach. Rails has historically had a has & belong to many relationship between controller contexts and views, which is essentially global and easy to get super confusing. React (and now browser-react aka web components) provide a better way of tackling this problem.
And... they hook up directly to my cache? They provide a great way of broadcasting dom updates directly? They interoperate with web components no problem where I need high fidelity interaction/performance? etc etc. Rails... has done it again.
No getting away from how useful it is.