NPM vs Ruby on Rails
When comparing NPM vs Ruby on Rails, the Slant community recommends Ruby on Rails for most people. In the question“What are the best web design tools?” Ruby on Rails is ranked 8th while NPM is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Ruby on Rails is:
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Compatible with any CLI
NPM is compatible with any CLI the developer wants to use.
Pro Plenty of helpful NPM modules/plugins
NPM has a strong community that has developed plenty of libraries and plugins that are useful to developers.
Pro Very concise configuration
NPM scripts require fewer lines of code to run a given task. This is true even when it's for running build processes. Using Unix pipes lots of tasks can be reduced to one-liners.
Pro Does not need any wrapper modules
With other task runners, you need to install wrapper modules for tools you may already have installed. When using NPM that's not necessary, to use the tools you need, just install them directly through NPM.
Pro Part of node.js distribution
Pro You're most likely using NPM already
Pro Uncomplicated package management system
When it works...
Pro Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides
The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.
Pro Many plugins (gems) available
There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use.
Pro Ruby is a nice readable language
Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.
presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end
Pro Good conventions
MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?"
Pro Small projects are very easy and it's possible to finish one in very little time
The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails.
Pro Cool language
Pro Supported on every major cloud or VPS hosting service
Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way.
Pro Meta-programming capabilities
Cons
Con Custom tasks require additional keyword 'run'
Only a few standard tasks support being executed without the run
keyword (e.g., npm start
vs npm run customtask
)
Con Not a build system, only a task runner
It is supposed to be used for running gulp, webpack or whatever. But it is not supposed to be used as a build system.
Con Passing parameters is awkward
In order to pass additional parameters to npm you must add them after --
(e.g., npm run build -- --custom='foo'
).
Con Badly documented
Less than bare minimum official documentation leaves users in the dark without taking often expensive external courses. Even the --help text has unpluggable gaps. One official source notes the documentation isn't adequate yet nothing has been done to fix this.
Con Lot of issues with authentication and random node problems
Unable to recover from common depencies conflicts consistantly. Error messages are not always helpful to debugging. Doesn't account well for users with different versions of node.
Con Does not run well with Windows
Since a lot of projects that use NPM as a build tool most of the time make use of Bash scripts as well. This means that open source projects that run the command npm run
may run into issues when used in a Windows environment.
Con Doesn't allow you to create build process with complicated logic on its own
In complex heterogeneous app you will quickly migrate to gulp, webpack or whatever leaving to NPM only simple task running responsibility.
Con Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper
Rails' simplicity is deceptive. It's learning curve is really low at first, and the huge number of tutorials and guides out there for starting with Rails make it even easier. But it starts getting harder and harder as apps become more complicated. If good code conventions and OO design are not followed, then the codebase will be all over the place and it becomes impossible to maintain it.
Con Too much magic
So much behavior is implemented with dynamic behind-the-scenes changes to existing classes that obscure bugs are way too common. Conflicting interactions between multiple plugins that both try to change the same objects are a particularly pernicious example.
Con Too much convention
Con Not a very popular language outside of web development
Con Bad performance
Among the slowest frameworks. If you want to scale, you will have to migrate to another land.