Rails gives you a lot of things bundled together. Depending on what you’re doing, it can be better to use less tightly coupled parts. Thus, if you’re staying in Ruby, Sinatra can be a much simpler choice if you’re focus is on REST API’s.
Don’t let the vocal minority fool you. Rails, like other established framework, has a lot of feature that makes it work just fine.
The defaults chosen by rails are chosen so we don’t waste our time making those decisions. There’s a few things I would like to add on the subject of choice.
Rails has choice. A lot of it. My projects are not built the same way as all others because I came to understand how rails works internally and made small adjustments on a per-project basis. No monkey-patching, just options that you can set. Many complaints I’ve seen about rails lack of choices came as a lack of knowledge of how rails work. If someone looks at rails for 2 weeks and feel like it has no choice, there’s nothing to do help them. They don’t take the time to appreciate the framework and they probably jump from 1 framework to another every 6 months.
Rails is a general framework, if you get to understand the way it works, it does wonder. But like any project of this scale, you need to learn it to make better use of it.
Sinatra is the exact opposite. You get to understand it very quickly and can probably understand the whole stack after 2 weeks playing with it. But you’ll end up limited and will start to add 3rd party gems very soon as there’s not a lot that comes with it.
Which do you prefer:
Being overwhelmed at first and slowly learn to appreciate how things are designed?
Do you want to feel at ease right away then need to find 3rd party gems (that are not always well-maintained/compatible with each other) and try to glue them all together?
You seemed to have chosen the first one (as I did), others have chosen the latter.
That’s what I dislike most about it. There’s too much magic. Certain things work because they’re named similarly (but not identically!), and there’s no code I can follow (other than deep in the Rails internals) that take me from point A to point B. Half the time I’m wondering whether I’m actually writing code or using a DSL.
This is such a powerful post. I hear so many times that when building a product, you should start with an API and build your client by consuming the API. I keep repeating that it’s a bad idea over and over.
API’s are hard to get right and are not easy to maintain. Thanks for sharing!
I believe that in the end, it’s a matter of knowing what to trust. I have an alpha that I built on OS X that would use url schemes to communicate with a small application you would have installed that would store a secret, the small application would then prove to the server that the computer is authorized to log in to that account and via websocket, the server would tell the browser that it’s authenticated and let it refresh to access secured content (Do I make sense?)
Marco Arment did implement something like what this article is about for his latest product (can’t remember, sorry).
Sorry I didn’t see the comment as the submission was nuked off the front page I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I tried Ghost before starting this project so you may find similarities. However there is many fundamental differences between the two projects. The most important difference between the two is how Ecrire lets you customize pretty much everything while Ghost removes as much customization as possible. In ghost, you write in markdown, images are positioned in a certain way and unless you want to start customizing themes, you are pretty much stuck with what they gave you.
When you write a post in Ecrire, you can change the whole look and feel right from the editor. As a blogger, I’ve always had a hard time editing my post. Sometimes, you just want to tweak a small thing in your post because you want to show the information in a certain way, Ecrire allows that.
Also, Ecrire is made for developers. From the get go, there’s an awesome library named prism.js that does code highlighting for you. That library supports virtually any programming language and extending prism to support your language wouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
I don’t know for you, but when I want to show code snippet, I want to show them with full code highlighting. I know you can use a gist and what not but I grew tired of using that extra step every time for little gain.
In some way, Ecrire is much closer to Wordpress than it is to Ghost in term of what you can do with your editor.
I hope this helps you understand and sorry again for not answering you on HN.
(If you go to your profile page on HN there’s a link to view a list of your submissions)
While I’ve only played a little bit with Ghost (the split screen editor and image uploader are what made me compare the two internally), customizing a theme isn’t difficult, and while it doesn’t have something like prism.js out of the box, adding that (or Google Code Prettify, or any syntax highlighter) isn’t difficult.
Anyways, looks neat. I probably wouldn’t use it because I would much rather use markdown to write blog posts and prefer flat-file or statically generated systems, but it looks neat.
This is my first submit so please correct me if I do something wrong :)
This is a project that I have been working on for the last 3 months. It’s still in alpha but I believe it’s mature enough to be shared with the world.
After some frustration with many blog engine I’ve tried, I decided to come up with my own. I believe the Readme explains a lot of my frustration and goals with this project but if you have any question don’t hesitate.
Rails gives you a lot of things bundled together. Depending on what you’re doing, it can be better to use less tightly coupled parts. Thus, if you’re staying in Ruby, Sinatra can be a much simpler choice if you’re focus is on REST API’s.
Don’t let the vocal minority fool you. Rails, like other established framework, has a lot of feature that makes it work just fine.
The defaults chosen by rails are chosen so we don’t waste our time making those decisions. There’s a few things I would like to add on the subject of choice.
Rails has choice. A lot of it. My projects are not built the same way as all others because I came to understand how rails works internally and made small adjustments on a per-project basis. No monkey-patching, just options that you can set. Many complaints I’ve seen about rails lack of choices came as a lack of knowledge of how rails work. If someone looks at rails for 2 weeks and feel like it has no choice, there’s nothing to do help them. They don’t take the time to appreciate the framework and they probably jump from 1 framework to another every 6 months.
Rails is a general framework, if you get to understand the way it works, it does wonder. But like any project of this scale, you need to learn it to make better use of it.
Sinatra is the exact opposite. You get to understand it very quickly and can probably understand the whole stack after 2 weeks playing with it. But you’ll end up limited and will start to add 3rd party gems very soon as there’s not a lot that comes with it.
Which do you prefer:
Being overwhelmed at first and slowly learn to appreciate how things are designed?
Do you want to feel at ease right away then need to find 3rd party gems (that are not always well-maintained/compatible with each other) and try to glue them all together?
You seemed to have chosen the first one (as I did), others have chosen the latter.
and near-English syntax
That’s what I dislike most about it. There’s too much magic. Certain things work because they’re named similarly (but not identically!), and there’s no code I can follow (other than deep in the Rails internals) that take me from point A to point B. Half the time I’m wondering whether I’m actually writing code or using a DSL.
http://pothibo.com - I give tips and tricks on how to build dynamic web application with Ruby On Rails and Javascript.
This is such a powerful post. I hear so many times that when building a product, you should start with an API and build your client by consuming the API. I keep repeating that it’s a bad idea over and over.
API’s are hard to get right and are not easy to maintain. Thanks for sharing!
I really like ideas about password less system. I even wrote a post about it (http://pothibo.com/2013/08/building-a-password-less-system-part-one/)
I believe that in the end, it’s a matter of knowing what to trust. I have an alpha that I built on OS X that would use url schemes to communicate with a small application you would have installed that would store a secret, the small application would then prove to the server that the computer is authorized to log in to that account and via websocket, the server would tell the browser that it’s authenticated and let it refresh to access secured content (Do I make sense?)
Marco Arment did implement something like what this article is about for his latest product (can’t remember, sorry).
I asked this on Hacker News, but didn’t get a response, so here it goes again.
How is this better than any other existing solution? Specifically, how is this better than Ghost, which it seems to take heavy inspiration from?
Sorry I didn’t see the comment as the submission was nuked off the front page I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I tried Ghost before starting this project so you may find similarities. However there is many fundamental differences between the two projects. The most important difference between the two is how Ecrire lets you customize pretty much everything while Ghost removes as much customization as possible. In ghost, you write in markdown, images are positioned in a certain way and unless you want to start customizing themes, you are pretty much stuck with what they gave you.
When you write a post in Ecrire, you can change the whole look and feel right from the editor. As a blogger, I’ve always had a hard time editing my post. Sometimes, you just want to tweak a small thing in your post because you want to show the information in a certain way, Ecrire allows that.
Also, Ecrire is made for developers. From the get go, there’s an awesome library named prism.js that does code highlighting for you. That library supports virtually any programming language and extending prism to support your language wouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
I don’t know for you, but when I want to show code snippet, I want to show them with full code highlighting. I know you can use a gist and what not but I grew tired of using that extra step every time for little gain.
In some way, Ecrire is much closer to Wordpress than it is to Ghost in term of what you can do with your editor.
I hope this helps you understand and sorry again for not answering you on HN.
(If you go to your profile page on HN there’s a link to view a list of your submissions)
While I’ve only played a little bit with Ghost (the split screen editor and image uploader are what made me compare the two internally), customizing a theme isn’t difficult, and while it doesn’t have something like prism.js out of the box, adding that (or Google Code Prettify, or any syntax highlighter) isn’t difficult.
Anyways, looks neat. I probably wouldn’t use it because I would much rather use markdown to write blog posts and prefer flat-file or statically generated systems, but it looks neat.
This is my first submit so please correct me if I do something wrong :)
This is a project that I have been working on for the last 3 months. It’s still in alpha but I believe it’s mature enough to be shared with the world.
After some frustration with many blog engine I’ve tried, I decided to come up with my own. I believe the Readme explains a lot of my frustration and goals with this project but if you have any question don’t hesitate.