There seems to be an ever-present high-level of defensiveness from the Ruby community over JS/React. Rails has had a profound impact on web development, promoting fast starts and shipping quickly. Companies like Shopify and Twitter benefited greatly from this. But the framework is 18 years old. The web that it was created for has changed significantly.
2. For people who had to ship a Rails API + JS SPA, their workflow felt slow, brittle, and cumbersome. It wasn’t their imagination either—testing the stack required integration tests, which are always slow. Maintaining an HTTP API to talk to the SPA is additional effort that’s not needed, which Hotwired has demonstrated clearly.
I still think Rails has a lot of fuel left in its tank, thanks to Hotwired and the big companies behind it, but I agree the “Rails is the most productive framework” gets way overplayed. It was def “most productive” 18 years ago, but most other modern frameworks took notice, caught up, and have even surpassed Rails in a lot of ways.
The Ruby runtime leaves a lot to desire when you compare it to runtimes like Elixir/BEAM, Go, etc. I also think Rails has a terrible view layer, but most folks don’t quite understand that that means yet. This is something I’m working on at the moment.
The Rails view layer used to be quite nice at its peak. Way better than many of the alternatives. That you could execute actual code inside a view was just magical.
The framework was first conceived 18 years ago, but continues to evolve. The framework has also changed significantly to deal with functionality that modern web applications need, in much the same way the Javascript community has evolved to better suit the needs of the modern web application.
