Just Rails
We needed to build an app from scratch a couple of months ago which is always an opportunity to try out some new ideas. After a few years of building Vue apps (living inside Ruby on Rails) we decided to see what would happen if we stuck to Rails' recommendations — simplifying everything as much as possible.
Goals #
- Faster to develop, build and use
- Simpler to maintain
- No compromise on user experience
How we did it #
- Ruby on Rails
- Hotwire — Turbo and Stimulus
- That's about it
Conclusion #
Two months in and we have no regrets. We've got a fast, simple app that was a joy to develop. It felt like adding new features was 10x easier than with Vue. That could be because of a few things:
- We had a pretty good knowledge of the domain and knew from the outset how most things should work.
- Every new app has a honeymoon period where features are easy to add and tests run fast.
- We were focused on building this app over a short period of time and it was a very productive few weeks.
But I do think that the most significant reasons were:
- Not having to build an API and and client UI separately.
- Turbo really does make development fast.
- No build step or transpiling of Javascript (e.g. no Webpack).
And a lot of that is possible because modern browsers are so good:
- Modern Javascript support is widespread.
- HTTP2 means you can download many small files without overhead (no need to bundle things into one big file).