Why Rails? Other Frameworks?

Why Rails?

Rails provides a robust, tried and true tool chain that takes care of much of the day to day details of building your app. Hyperstack builds on the Rails philosophy of convention over configuration, meaning that there is almost no boiler plate code in your Rails-Hyperstack application. Almost every line that you write for your Hyperstack application will deal with the application requirements. We have seen real reductions of up to 400% in the lines of code needed to deliver high quality functionality.

People sometimes balk at Rails because when they see the huge number of files and directories generated by the Rails installer, it looks crazy, complex, and ineffecient. Keep in mind that this has very little if any impact on your application's performance, and when developing code 90% of your time will be spent in the following directories: app/models and app/hyperstack. The rest of the files are there to hold configuration files, and seldom used content, so they have a place out of the way of your main development activities.

Developers often believe that Rails modules like ActionController and ActiveRecord while powerful are slow. In the case of Hyperstack this is largely irrelevant since one of our goals is to offload as much work to the client as possible. For example rather than have a multitude of controllers delivering different page views and updates, your client side Hyperstack code is now responsible for that. The role of the server becomes the central database, and the place where secure operations are executed (such as sending mail, authenticating users etc.)

How about other Rack Frameworks?

But still you may have specific needs for a lighter weight system, or have an existing Sinatra app (for example) that you would like to use with Hyperstack. For now we will say it's in the plan, and it's just a matter of time. If you are interested leave a comment on this issue: https://github.com/hyperstack-org/hyperstack/issues/340