When Ruby on Rails was the most trendy thing in the web development world, I felt so cutting-edge! The coolest thing to develop with was Rails and I was developing with Rails. This meant I was the coolest guy living on the earth!
Things have changed. Rails is still alive and strong, but it’s not the flavor of the day anymore. As a freelancer I have the chance to decide to build my new projects using promising technologies such as MeteorJS, React or Angular. In actual truth, I did consider this option as I had that fear lurking in me, you know, that fear which was telling me that If I’d stick with Rails for too long, I would soon become a relic.
But then I remembered that I loved ruby way more than Javascript. And I remembered how pleasant it was to work with Rails. And I remembered how proficient I had become working with this framework along the years. What a waste it would be to drop it all just to use what is popular at the moment. I also believe that rendering HTML and CSS is a job for the server and that sprinkling some Javascript on top of a web application is more than enough most of the time. I still think single page applications are great and have their use-cases but have a tendency to be used even when it feels out of place (content based websites, apps with very little user interactions, etc). I might be wrong, but this is where I stand today.
Today, Rails has something very valuable it didn’t have at the beginning: maturity. It feels so good to use such a polished and solid framework that has proven its merits again and again throughout the years. The community is still very strong and friendly and I’m extremely glad to be a part of it. Rails 5 will soon be released and I’m still excited as I was when Rails 3 was just around the corner.
I am going to leave you with something to meditate:
Ruby and Rails are like a couple of lovers: Ruby is the beautiful woman, the precious jewel, the inspiration. And Rails is the man, the hero, the guardian who protects the jewel and make it shine even brighter.
Now, that’s something. How poetic is that! Can we say the same about Javascript?!
UPDATE
Hey, even Matz think this was poetic! 🙂
“maturity” (and “ecosystem”) was exactly what php / java / asp, and a lot of other languages before that, said when rails came.
maturity did not save the old programmming languages, it will not save now.
ps.: I still love rails 😉
I see what you mean, but maturity is something that any great framework/language will attain one day or the other. It simply is a stage of evolution, a desirable one at that.
The word may sound a bit conservative but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can have both: Maturity and Innovation.