rubocop-rails VS redwood

1) Auto-correcting a whole (large) codebase at once with tons of offenses and dozens of active branches should be used with caution. Merge conflicts, blame pollution (ok, can be solved with .git-blame-ignore-revs, though can hardly remember any project using it). Though, the most important argument is that auto-correct can introduce bugs. Unfortunately, even safe autocorrect can be unsafe. Recently, I broke one popular project (with a decent, but not 99.999% test coverage) with a single "safe" auto-correction commit 🙂 (This issue).

It's also possible to extend RuboCop through additional linters and formatters. You can build your own extensions or take advantage of existing ones if they are relevant to your project. For example, a Rails extension is available for the purpose of enforcing Rails best practices and coding conventions.

I'm still getting used to writing these. Still, this article from Evil Martians has been a big help. The rubocop-rails codebase also had some cops similar to what I wanted to put together. The cop we've put together checks if the class inherits from ActiveModel::Serializer and adds an offence to that line.

Let's take a glance at the action_filter cop real quick here, but just a quick part of it:

Following on from this, I highly recommend setting up your editor to automatically lint Ruby files with RuboCop and its Rails extension and start adapting your code to adhere to the Ruby Style Guide.

I just would like to point out that even though that is the most sane way, it comes with it owns set of problems. One of them is when developers start to code to cheat the linter, or they complicate the code just to "make the linter happy", another is when the linting rule introduces problems/errors like https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop-rails/issues/418

Frameworks are a theme with this month's Release Radar, so here's another. Redwood is a full-stack, JavaScript/TypeScript web application, designed to scale with you. It uses React frontend for the frontend and links to a custom GraphQL API for the backend. The latest version includes a bunch of breaking changes such as moving to Node 20.0, the Redwood Studio, and highly requested GraphQL features such as Realtime, Fragments, and Trusted Documents, the server file, new router hooks, and heaps more. If you've previously used Redwood, you'll probably want to upgrade to version 7.0. The team have put together a handy migration guide for you to follow.

The other piece of important information to acknowledge here is that when we say RSCs need a framework, “framework” effectively just means “Next.js.” There are some smaller frameworks (like Waku) that support RSCs. There are also some larger and more established frameworks (like Redwood) that have plans to support RSCs or (like Gatsby) only support RSCs in beta. We will likely see this change once we get React 19 and RSCs are part of the Stable version. However, for now, Next.js is currently the only framework recommended in the official React docs that supports server components.

Although there are quite a few opinionated battery-included frameworks that have picked up everything for you like RedwoodJS, Blitz, and Create-T3-App, you still need to choose between them and hope that they will remain mainstream and well-maintained in the future. So how should we choose?

Web development frameworks in JavaScript, such as NextJS and RedwoodJS, have gained popularity among developers. Choosing the right framework, library, or tool for a project is crucial for efficient development. Developers often seek the best tools to save time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The community here is pretty friendly. https://redwoodjs.com/

Next.js 13 ignited the first wave of attention to React Server Components (RSC) around the end of last year. Over time, other frameworks, like Remix and RedwoodJS, have also started to put RSC into their future road maps. However, the entire "moving computation to the server-side" direction of React/Next.js has been highly controversial from the very beginning.

I'm currently experimenting with the fantastic Redwood framework. However, while going through the excellent tutorial, I didn't find any guidance on using data validation libraries like Yup, Zod, Vest, etc. So, I had to do some investigation and came up with a solution. This article describes the implementation of validation with Zod in a fresh Redwood app. You can find the sources at this github repository.

RBAC is one of the most common authorization models - users are assigned different roles, and resource access privileges are controlled at the role level. Despite its limitations, RBAC is a popular choice for simple applications, and some frameworks (like RedwoodJS) have built-in support for it.

Check it out here: https://redwoodjs.com/