Matestack: Rapidly create interactive UIs in Ruby

`my_frist_page`

I like this trend of moving back toward component based architecture. This has many similarities to Flutter, which for me has been a major breath of fresh air.

What still gets me: HTML/CSS/JS honestly just sucks for building complex apps. We have shoehorned tools that were meant for simple document display into doing our bidding, but at what cost? Hours and hours of developer agony. It doesn't need to be this hard. I like looking at one file written in one language to see both the look and behavior of an app. There has just been too much mental overhead. I like the way things are going and this framework is step forward.

In their architecture diagram they're comparing their stack to one with distinct native UIs for each device type but they don't really explain how they're replicating that functionality. Unless there's some trick there should still be 3 UI blocks in the Ruby side of their diagram.

I won't go so far as to say this makes things worse but it seems like you're just moving things around. You can still have distinct client code on the Ruby side. If your goal is to simply move all this work out of JavaScript and into Ruby because you like Ruby, it seems fine.

You no longer have the explicit rest API to force a separation of UI and business logic but you can just enforce that with coding practices. You lose the ability to decouple UI dev entirely though.

Doesn't Dart have generics and a lot of other language features that Go chose to omit?

I for one think that this looks incredibly impressive. A solution to reduce what needs to be written while giving ruby developers a powerful way to build a modern frontend, making it possible to stick with pretty much Ruby. And the website explains the concept very well. It's pretty much contrary to the route I took for my current project (and Rails instead of Ruby :( ), but something to bookmark and consider next time. Excited to see whether that concepts works as well in practice. That's a win in my book.

One question though: In your diagram you are saying Infrastructure 1, 2, 3 for the classical/current approach going into one API vs Matestack sitting on top of one infrastructure, right? Why? If there is an API sitting between backend and the UI there should not be a need for three backend infrastructures. I feel like you mean something else there, and the text also does not fit to the diagram as I understand it. Maybe something to double check.

The comment below how Matestack maps to native apps is warranted though. You are planning alternative renderers to web/vue, targeting native apps?