There’s a new release about to drop which is Rails 6.1 that covers some interesting developments.
GitHub took all of their code associated with running “web scale” applications that need to talk to multiple databases at the same time and put that into a dead simple native Rails framework.
Basecamp have spent the last couple of years (I think?) working in secret on what they claim is an entirely new way of doing all things front end. There isn’t a LOT of details on that at the moment and it’s kind of built up as a big surprise. But everyone who has had a behind the scenes look seems unusually excited.
There’s a kind of interesting web based interface for describing and developing all kinds of boilerplate parts of your application that could really speed up development time https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/35489
But basically at this stage you have 3 major contributors of Shopify, Basecamp / Hey and Github extracting huge parts of their internal systems and rewriting them as mini Rails frameworks with famously simple APIs for people to use.
That’s obviously in addition to everyone / everything else. I think the future looks bright.
> an entirely new way of doing all things front end.
Are you referring to ViewComponent: https://github.com/github/view_component? As someone who's happily been continuing to make Rails apps for the past few years (and avoiding Angular like the plague after being burned badly with it), this seems really intriguing, but I'm waiting on the 6.1 release before I try it.
Nah this is entirely seperate from that although I think View Component (also from GitHub in case anyone is wondering) is super exciting.
They are basically doing a major rewrite of Turbolinks and Stimulus I think. If you go to app.hey.com and jump into dev tools you can kind of start to piece things together somewhat since they have made all of the source maps available. But I’m yet to see too many people really figure out what is happening and I’m excited for the official announcement.
I think the idea that Rails has somewhat lagged behind the rest of the front end world is in many ways an overblown talking point but is at the same time in no way an unfair criticism.
I’ve heard the core team make several references for the last year that this new approach is basically to front end what Rails was to backend when it launched in terms of developer experience while keeping 80-90% of the performance benefits of SPAs but with 0% of the drama. Or at least this is how I understand them to be promoting it.
GitHub took all of their code associated with running “web scale” applications that need to talk to multiple databases at the same time and put that into a dead simple native Rails framework.
Basecamp have spent the last couple of years (I think?) working in secret on what they claim is an entirely new way of doing all things front end. There isn’t a LOT of details on that at the moment and it’s kind of built up as a big surprise. But everyone who has had a behind the scenes look seems unusually excited.
There’s a kind of interesting web based interface for describing and developing all kinds of boilerplate parts of your application that could really speed up development time https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/35489
Some cool security stuff like this https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1268236728134889475?s=21 and promoting things like WebAuthn to be first class citizens.
But basically at this stage you have 3 major contributors of Shopify, Basecamp / Hey and Github extracting huge parts of their internal systems and rewriting them as mini Rails frameworks with famously simple APIs for people to use.
That’s obviously in addition to everyone / everything else. I think the future looks bright.