<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?</title><text>I am still frustrated with the amount of incidental complexity required whenever I want to do this. My latest attempt was to use a Digital Ocean droplet with Django pre-installed. I guess the biggest issue there was setting up something so that I could easily deploy my local version to the droplet (ended up using git&amp;#x2F;Github), and ensuring those two environments were in sync. I looked into Docker in some detail about a year ago, and I think it&amp;#x27;s the only pretty good solution for this I&amp;#x27;ve come across—but there&amp;#x27;s a steep up front cost in learning&amp;#x2F;setup etc. (or so it seems).&lt;p&gt;What services and technologies do you use when you&amp;#x27;d like to quickly build a web app which may never be more than a prototype, but may also turn into something real? A big aspect of what I&amp;#x27;m wondering is about automatically setting something up for keeping local&amp;#x2F;production environments in sync, quickly deploying to production, and not having to mess with a bunch of server configuration things, user accounts, security, etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fyfy18</author><text>I’d say the slowness of Ruby is really over exaggerated. For most web applications it’s good enough, and the speed of development (how fast you can ship) almost always outweighs any costs from it being slow.&lt;p&gt;You can always replace the endpoints that are slow with something written in a more performant language like Golang or Erlang later.&lt;p&gt;I’ve worked on all sorts of applications from corporate CRUD to mobile billing gateways written in Ruby (usually Rails), and in very few cases has Ruby itself been the bottleneck.</text></item><item><author>nooyurrsdey</author><text>For some reason people seem to constant doubt Ruby-ists and Rails Devs.&lt;p&gt;I completely get that other languages have huge benefits over Ruby. Golang being compiled or Java running anywhere, etc... And ruby is slow, totally understood.&lt;p&gt;But if youre talking about getting a functioning webapp up and running &lt;i&gt;quickly&lt;/i&gt;... no way anyone is beating a Rails dev in setting one up. The piping and scaffolding are all built in and the gem ecosystem (for web apps specifically) is so well maintained and robust that you can drop it in to your app and get a functioning product with ease.&lt;p&gt;I know that&amp;#x27;s a loaded statement bc Rails becomes not so great in other cases like building speedy backend jobs. But for a small user-facing web app it&amp;#x27;s hands down the best.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WJW</author><text>There are some properly large companies like github and shopify that run a large rails stack, it seems to work out pretty well for them. At my current workplace we have some streaming servers pushing about 15 gigabyte&amp;#x2F;second at peak load and the ruby processes easily saturate the available bandwidth on the EC2 instances. Like you say, the slowness of Ruby is greatly exaggerated. Sure we could rewrite the whole thing in Go&amp;#x2F;C++&amp;#x2F;Rust&amp;#x2F;etc, but it would not work any better and the gain of using 10% CPU instead of 20 is not really relevant since it&amp;#x27;s the NIC that is the bottleneck.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What&apos;s your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018?</title><text>I am still frustrated with the amount of incidental complexity required whenever I want to do this. My latest attempt was to use a Digital Ocean droplet with Django pre-installed. I guess the biggest issue there was setting up something so that I could easily deploy my local version to the droplet (ended up using git&amp;#x2F;Github), and ensuring those two environments were in sync. I looked into Docker in some detail about a year ago, and I think it&amp;#x27;s the only pretty good solution for this I&amp;#x27;ve come across—but there&amp;#x27;s a steep up front cost in learning&amp;#x2F;setup etc. (or so it seems).&lt;p&gt;What services and technologies do you use when you&amp;#x27;d like to quickly build a web app which may never be more than a prototype, but may also turn into something real? A big aspect of what I&amp;#x27;m wondering is about automatically setting something up for keeping local&amp;#x2F;production environments in sync, quickly deploying to production, and not having to mess with a bunch of server configuration things, user accounts, security, etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fyfy18</author><text>I’d say the slowness of Ruby is really over exaggerated. For most web applications it’s good enough, and the speed of development (how fast you can ship) almost always outweighs any costs from it being slow.&lt;p&gt;You can always replace the endpoints that are slow with something written in a more performant language like Golang or Erlang later.&lt;p&gt;I’ve worked on all sorts of applications from corporate CRUD to mobile billing gateways written in Ruby (usually Rails), and in very few cases has Ruby itself been the bottleneck.</text></item><item><author>nooyurrsdey</author><text>For some reason people seem to constant doubt Ruby-ists and Rails Devs.&lt;p&gt;I completely get that other languages have huge benefits over Ruby. Golang being compiled or Java running anywhere, etc... And ruby is slow, totally understood.&lt;p&gt;But if youre talking about getting a functioning webapp up and running &lt;i&gt;quickly&lt;/i&gt;... no way anyone is beating a Rails dev in setting one up. The piping and scaffolding are all built in and the gem ecosystem (for web apps specifically) is so well maintained and robust that you can drop it in to your app and get a functioning product with ease.&lt;p&gt;I know that&amp;#x27;s a loaded statement bc Rails becomes not so great in other cases like building speedy backend jobs. But for a small user-facing web app it&amp;#x27;s hands down the best.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>technion</author><text>I think the rise of Mastodon is really pouring some hot water on that meme. Lots of really small VPSs are running some fairly big instances. Although I&amp;#x27;m only personally using one of them, it&amp;#x27;s very fast, and the general view is that isn&amp;#x27;t unusual.&lt;p&gt;I get that it won&amp;#x27;t hit Twitter scale but that matches the majority of &amp;quot;how do I build a prototype&amp;quot; use cases.</text></comment>