Matestack – Reactive UIs in pure Ruby

Yea, I have switched to Django with the intent of continuing to develop primarily SPAs.

Like I said in other comments I'd only build an API in Express if I needed its particular performance characteristics.

I've checked other tools in the JS ecosystem that serve as "low-code" API layers, but upon close inspection they always seem to have some limitations on the business logic you can write, and some of them lock you in to products. No thanks.

I'm finding Django REST gives me a sweet middle ground between dev speed backed by great abstraction "magic" and freedom to customize as the app grows.

I think it's quite the contrary. Rails integrated Webpack a long time ago in it's basic installation so if you do `rails new my_cool_app` you have Webpack ready(and preconfigured with React/Vue/Elm etc.) right out of the box. Also it moved away from Coffeescript and jQuery.

And for the full page reloads, which you think is weird, there are Turbolinks(again preconfigured in the basic install) since like 2012. I'm not sure React or other reactivity foos already existed at this time. And now we have things like Stimulus and Stimulus Reflex and others so the development ain't stoping now either.

So the feeling that Rails are stuck or out of date is really only a feeling.

I second this. In fact, it's the #1 reason I don't enjoy "Ruby" anymore. Ruby as a language is great if you stick to a small subset of its capabilities (meaning, largely skip the metaprogramming, and definitely skip the make-a-dsl route).

Basic procedural Ruby, with some thoughtful functional style collection operations, is very elegant and fun to use (because you can get a job done in few lines of code which aren't terribly hard to understand later).

But as soon as you start dipping into metaprogramming, you've lost your ability to see what's happening. You have to understand the system to... understand it. Defining methods on the fly, calling methods via send() and a string/symbol, and using method_missing as a dynamic dispatcher are some of the most abused and least easy to understand later without current documentation of their use in the system.

In general, there's too much magic in a lot of the Ruby ecosystem, and some of us are really pushing back against that.

It feels really contrived. To be fair, I have not tried it, but it just looks like an incremental improvement at a first glance. I am going to stick with JavaScript and continue to use Ruby as backend code.

Probably nowadays React with webpack provides a stable experience.

It might be that my impression of SPA is also based on my resistance to dedicate time to learn the new tools. Usually I want to start doing stuff and then go back and read more.

This is why I say it felt that way and I did not say that the SPA is unstable.

Here is how my experience with SPA looked like:

- I started with jQuery, 10 years ago or so (actually with Scriptaculous :) ), replacing parts of the interface with Ajax calls. Worked a little for a while then got into very ugly code both on JS and on Ruby. This was not a full SPA, but it was moving into that direction.

- Then I moved to Backbone around 2013 I think. In the beginning it sounded very nice in the end again the code and mix with jQuery quickly become hard to organise. Also as it started to be slower to build MVPs in terms of moving fast and adding application features.

- So I tried Angular and my main problem there was debugging production issues. The errors I saw on browser console were mostly not giving any clue about what went wrong. Probably it was because of the whole compile JS pipeline to support various browsers ...

- Then I inherited a Webapp written in React (around 2014 or 2015) with backend in Rails which was a second-screen for a radio show. It provided various live interaction with listeners. There I saw the need for SPA but also is where SPA lost me as I spent a lot of time debugging simple things from someone could not be able to login to how long it took to add a new page to display some poll results. For sure a big part (or the most part) is on me and with my expectation about how things were working in Rails where if I wanted a page to display some poll results it meant to simply build a .html.erb and it was done. Of course later on came Action Cable and I started using it for any live thing.

Again I am not saying SPA is in general heavy or hard to use. I am saying that for the products I build SSR sprinkled with some small reactive things is enough and for me (when I am mostly the solo developer) it is fast to produce (from idea to deploy) and debug a feature for a web app.

That being told I am trying to learn Vue - and force myself to use so that I want to have experience with this kind of frameworks.