Why Rails 5 / Turbolinks 3.0 / Action Cable matter, and why @dhh was right all along

Rails is presented as a framework that made it easy to build polished web apps quickly, and the post says that this advantage was larger than what many JavaScript-heavy SPA stacks offer. It argues that trend-driven choices often add complexity, slow development, and raise the learning curve, especially for less experienced developers.

Reading notes

#

• Rails won developers and entrepreneurs because it made building polished web apps fast and simple.
• SPA stacks are described as slower to develop with and as introducing new problems to solve.
• In the early Rails days, small teams could ship working systems in a matter of weeks.
• Web development trends are treated with suspicion, since fashionable tools are often adopted before they are the right fit.
• The author says modern SPA-heavy stacks make feature work and maintenance slower than older Rails setups.
• Rails 5 is framed as adding Turbolinks 3.0, Action Cable, and rails-api into the framework.
• Turbolinks 3.0 is described as an evolutionary step that can update only parts of a page instead of replacing the whole page.
• Action Cable is presented as Rails support for real-time message passing with WebSockets.
• The post says WebSocket support matches real project needs, since several recent projects included real-time or chat features.
• rails-api is described as making slim, API-only Rails apps easier to build, which suits SPA backends.
• The author argues that bundled defaults can speed development without removing Rails flexibility.
• Turbolinks can still be disabled if it does not fit a project.
• The post says there will still be space for traditional server-rendered apps, so Rails is not going away soon.
• The closing advice is to question whether SPAs and extra abstraction layers are actually worth their cost.