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Ask HN: Stick with Flask or Learn Ruby on Rails?

14 pointsby methochrisabout 8 years ago
I have a hobby project I have been working on for years now. When I started it I had just learned some Python &amp; was trying my hand at dynamic webdev with flask. I&#x27;ve jumped off it &amp; onto other projects over the years but have recently decided it is a great idea that I want to focus on &amp; bring to the mainstream.<p>There is way too much &#x27;learning cruft&#x27; everywhere in my code and some functionality I want to changed so am starting fresh with some more recent boilerplate. My problem started when I went to update dependencies &amp; found that several of the flask extensions I rely on have not been updated in a very long time (years). And adding salt to the wound is I have found several of them have been forked by someone saying like &#x27;i had to fix this thing about the original extension so just made my own copy of it&#x27;. i honestly can&#x27;t tell if flask &amp; it&#x27;s extensions are just so rock solid that they don&#x27;t need to be touched or if half of it is just abandoned or in maintenance mode.<p>so, ruby on rails. I am a one-man shop and don&#x27;t have time to be keeping up with my framework and I love the idea that there is a committed group out there making sure this framework stays updated and on top of any issues. i like that every thing I could need to do with my app has been well thought out and thorough documentation&#x2F;tutorials provided for it. i can&#x27;t help but think that investing a few weeks to convert my knowledge of python&#x2F;flask to ruby&#x2F;rails is going to save me months on the back-end. but i&#x27;m really afraid to let go of all the time i have invested in the flask-version of my app. all the query syntax and work-arounds and utility functions i have built up will all need to be converted over. it seems like a horribly daunting task. my gut tells me it would be worth it but my mind tells me to just move forward with what I have and deal with the consequences when&#x2F;if they get here.<p>HN, what would you do?

7 comments

dermybabyabout 8 years ago
How do you like developing on Rails? You have the value of past experience with Flask - does the &#x27;newer&#x27; approach of RoR work for you?<p>Can you try rewriting in RoR&#x2F;Elixir&#x2F;NewShiny to see if that feeling goes away? Would you lose clients because of the switch to RoR?<p>All good items to ponder - that would be my thought process.I hope it helped.
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RUG3Yabout 8 years ago
Flask is awesome, the code is very readable and transparent. I&#x27;m not a fan of Rails because of all the &quot;magical&quot; things that happen. Of course, smarter people than I use Rails and have great results, but I&#x27;ll stick with Flask. Side note, Flask has really great source code too. I learned a ton from reading it.
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iurisilvioabout 8 years ago
Stick with Flask. I don&#x27;t think it is a good reason to change. To be fair, you&#x27;ll have the same maintenance issue with any language&#x2F;framework. Some are better maintained, but I think Flask&#x2F;Django&#x2F;RoR are in the same league.<p>I&#x27;m a huge Flask user, with projects with 50+ Flask extensions installed. Most of them I just plugged in and never had issues. Some issues I had were easy to patch and most of them were fixed upstream.<p>You have some complex extensions, but a lot of them are just small wrappers, so it is possible it&#x27;s just good enough and feature complete.
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cyberferretabout 8 years ago
The same issues seem to happen across the board, no matter which platform. I use a Ruby framework for most of my development (not Rails, but a Sinatra based one), and keep finding that gems my apps depend on can quickly become stale and abandoned all over the place.<p>Kind of disconcerting to go to Github to lodge a suspected bug report on a gem we use every day, and see that the last commit was 6 years ago!
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CCingabout 8 years ago
You&#x27;ll will find the same problems in rails community(and I guess in nodejs community too)<p>Learn to program and do it yourself if you don&#x27;t find a library&#x2F;gem. THIS is the solution (anyway in any platform&#x2F;framework you&#x27;ll have the &#x27;main&#x27; libraries&#x2F;gems updated...)<p>Stuck with what you know better and hack a product.
krystiangwabout 8 years ago
Well, Flask is still in the game. But ROR is much more popular so it is good way to go. Also for further projects. Check some stats: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobsquery.it&#x2F;stats&#x2F;backend-frameworks&#x2F;group" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jobsquery.it&#x2F;stats&#x2F;backend-frameworks&#x2F;group</a>
msieabout 8 years ago
Yes! Definitely! For all the reasons you stated. Dealing with neglected frameworks sucks.