Starting my journey with Volt

Let me start with a disclaimer that I'm new to the Volt framework. I probably get some things wrong. Don't rely on my opinions here :) The reason I'm blogging about it is to document my learning process. Also, by blogging I hope that dear readers will catch my mistakes and correct them in the comments. Thanks to that I'll learn more and can share a better knowledge in the future blog posts :)

I've played with Volt today. For those of you who don't know - Volt is a Ruby web framework. It's a bit unusual, as it's an isomorphic framework. The code is shared between the server and the client. It works in the browser thanks to the Opal - a ruby to javascript compiler (source to source). In a way, it's similar to Meteor.

Opal

I'm quite excited about Opal and the way it can influence the Ruby/Rails community. One year ago, I've recorded my suggestion/prediction that Opal can become the default JavaScript implementation in Rails apps. Here's the short (1 minutes) video of me science-fictioning about it, while walking in the forest near my home :)




I'm not following the Opal progress very closely, but from seeing what's possible in Volt, I feel quite confident about my last-year prediction.

I'll focus on Opal in another blog post. For now, let me come back to Volt.

The wow effect

I came to Rails very early, in 2004. It was due to the "wow effect". Being experienced with PHP, Java, ASP.NET it was amazing to see a result produced in such a short amount of time with so short codebase!

Over time, I learnt a lot about JavaScript frontends. Here is a 12-blog-posts summary of my lessons. I know what it takes to develop a nice Single Page Application (or however you prefer to call it).

This is the Volt wow effect. I'm old enough not be excited too easily with new shiny toys, but Volt does impress me. In almost no time, you've got a rich frontend, which works as you'd expect from a good JavaScript application - fast, interactive. You get the backend basically for free. It all autosyncs with the backend without any effort from your side. What's more, a new Volt app comes with authentication built-in for free.

Part of the wow effect is the fact that you don't need to run any database migrations to add new fields. It all relies on Mongo under the hood, so it's schema-less.

One of my roles is to be a Ruby/Rails teacher  / coach and I know how important it is to have a great "wow effect" for the students.

The developer happiness

Another thing that brought me to Rails was its developer oriented approach. The small things like console, like migrations (at that time it was huge), like seeing everything immediately on the screen without restarting the server. It was all there. It was all prepared to be very productive for the developer.

Volt is the same. There's lots of details that work very well. It's hard to mention them all. For me, it was great to see the browser with live reload out of the box. I change some Ruby code and it immediately pushes the code to the browser and the page is reloaded. I know there are more tools like that, but seeing it work with Ruby in the tool chain is just great.

The documentation

I followed the tutorial (try it, you'll get a better picture of it in 15 minutes, than from reading this post ;) ) and browsed through the documentation. All very precise, very simple. I didn't find any inconsistency with the actual behaviour.

The codebase

I only scanned some parts of the code and it seems like very well written code. I was curious how the "reactive DOM" thing works here. It was easy to find the right piece of code and understand how the "watching" works. When I browse the Rails codebase, I often feel lost as it depends on a lot of metaprogramming. I didn't feel the same here (yet).

BTW, yesterday I tried to run Opal with ReactJS but couldn't make it. There's probably no reason, why it wouldn't work, though, given more time. If you know anyone who did that successfully, I'd love to see the result :)

Components

I'm not experienced enough to see all the details, but I love the focus on components, from the beginning. Often, in Rails apps we think that some pieces may be extracted as an engine/component/module/gem *one day* and it rarely happens. Here, we're encouraged to do it from the beginning. The Volt components can be packaged as gems, which is quite interesting.

The architecture of a Volt app

As much as I'm impressed by Volt being a great framework for scaffolding/prototyping (maybe even better than Rails one day?), I also have some doubts.
A lot of my work in the last years was about decoupling legacy Rails applications. I wrote a book about Refactoring Rails apps and I keep collecting techniques which make it easier. Coupling is bad.

Is sharing the code between server and client a coupling? The answer to this question will be very important for me.

In a way, good decoupling may result in great reusability. There are applications, where the server role is simply to keep the data and to ensure basic authentication/authorisation rules. There are however also apps, where the server logic is much different from the client applications.

Is reusability the goal in itself? I don't think so. It's more of a nice side effect of good separation of concerns.

What's the Volt model of code reuse? At the moment, I'm not really prepared to answer this question easily. It seems to be, that at any moment, you can easily switch off the coupling, when required. That's a good sign. It's all Ruby under the hood, so we can do what we want.

Community

In case of frameworks, it's not always their authors vision, which drives how the apps are created. There's many good things in the Rails framework. Rails itself (nor the Rails core team) doesn't force you to write monolithic application - yet, that's what many people do. The main Volt author (Ryan Stout) seems to be very modularity-oriented. From what I see in the Gitter activities, this vision is shared by the early adopters. That's a good sign.

The future?

Arkency (my company) became experts in dealing with legacy Rails apps. We know how to decouple the app, step by step, in a safe manner. Are we going to become "legacy Volt apps experts" in 5 years from now? Time will tell... I have positive feelings about it. It's great to see new players in the Ruby community. There's no way it will become more popular than Rails, however competition is good. Volt is so different from Rails, that the Merb-case is not vere likely here ;)

I'm not recommending starting serious apps with Volt (yet). However, the framework is mature enough to be tried. In only 15 minutes you can build the Todo app from the tutorial. At least it will show you how the process of working can look, in the future and how different it is from your everyday flow.

As for me, I'm off to start another side-project with Volt now. Follow me on Twitter to see how it goes :)