Oh how I love Rails, the framework and language (Ruby) of developer happiness. But now working in AI, it's a Python game. This is maybe embarrassing to admit but I prefer having the Python pipeline, TensorFlow, numpy, etc. living on its own box, exposing inference as an api, so I can keep developing in Rails and its supporting ecosystem (background processing, push notifications, etc.) as the main app handling everything else.
I mean, I get it - for a personal project, I did exactly what you just described, wrote the web app in rails and wrote some scikit-learn stuff with python. I did this mainly because I like rails, I like python for ML stuff, and I didn't want to have to learn Django to get a prototype working.
But assuming you were willing to take a small hit/make a small investment in a new technology, do you think it might be a little better to have it all in python, and use Django? Or is the separation similar enough that it doesn't really make much of a difference (i.e., you'd be calling the ML stuff through an api anyway, an your web app would be pretty separate from your ML service, so the only real benefit to Django vs Rails is one language for everything, which I'm inclined to think isn't that big a deal).
I've moved more heavily into Python lately because of data analysis, ML, numpy, all that, and I am enjoying it a lot. I find python very nice to write in, even though I like Ruby and Rails a lot. Python looks good on the page, and has that clarity I like in ruby and rails, and of course the scientific programming world isn't really a ruby one, python is far, far more prevalent. So I've been thinking of taking the plunge and learning Django, but I'm not completely convinced it's really necessary, since you can do what you just described here...
Oh also, (sorry, this is a very scattered post), would you mind sharing some of the technical information about what tech you used to create the api for your python side?
Ok, so I'm going to bite. I'm using Django for my company's website[1], and while I think it's hands-down the best framework for Python, I must admit to having felt some envy when I investigated what all the fuss on Rails was all about.
I think Rails' controller concepts are cleaner, and its way of handling forms is simpler and more direct (granted, with more sugar or magic, which some have a problem with -- not me).
Why would that be embarrassing? You've effectively created your own private AI microservice (to use the buzzword du jour) and consumed it in your favorite webapp stack. Sounds pretty smart to me.
