How can Rails react to the rise of the JavaScript applications?

The rise of JavaScript applications is tremendous. Every week new JS frameworks appear. Every website UI is now JS-heavy.

How can Rails react to it?

Do we need to worry about our jobs?

History

Let's go back to the history for a while.

Rails was created as a light-weight, but well-structured alternative to create dynamic, db-backed, html websites.

I still own the main Rails book, that was published in 2005: Agile Web Development with Rails. I just checked, there was 558 pages of good content. Only 16 pages were about The Web, V2.0 (this part was written by Thomas Fuchs, not by the main authors - DHH and Dave Thomas). Back then, Rails supported JS via the prototype library. There was no mention about RJS, yet.

Late 2006, I bought another book - Ajax on Rails. I have it in front of me right now. This time, RJS was important already, as they wrote: "Ruby-generated JavaScript (RJS) is the capstone of Ajax in Rails". Before the concept was introduced in the book, all the server did was returning HTML snippets (data) and the JS libraries inserted it into appropriate places. No such thing as view model, data-binding, etc, yet.


Where are we now?

Rails does a really good job of handling the backend part. It's secure, based on conventions, all apps are similar, everybody knows how to work with it.

Look at the frontend part of many Rails apps, though - you don't see the conventions, you don't see the same structure everywhere.

There's this pro-Rails argument, that it's better for a startup to do Rails, because many Rails devs will know what is going on if the project is done the-Rails-way - so, it's easier to scale the team. It's no longer true, though. Yes, the backend part is usually familiar, but the JavaScripts? They're completely different in every Rails app. Often, they're like 50% of the codebase.

Some developers just hack together some jQuery plugins and call it a day.

Some developers go with DHH suggestions and use RJS (UPDATE: or clean JS returned from the server) (to be honest I have never seen this approach in a Rails app, but I'm sure someone followed DHH here).

The new trend is to use JS frameworks, like Ember.js or Angular.js, which are opinionated and feel more aligned to the philosophy of Rails (conventions, magic, implicit features).

Other developers (me included) want to control the JavaScript app and don't use any framework, relying on self-imposed architectures like http://hexagonaljs.com/.

How can Rails react?

There are some possible ways of reacting. I'm trying to be neutral here, although obviously I have an opinion on that.

1. We can leave it as it is, with [R]JS being recommended by the leader

From my observations, the [R]JS recommendation gets ignored mostly. To be fair, none of the leaders is actively discouraging anyone to use some proper JS frameworks. It's just not the main focus.

This leaves the community disconnected from the leader (which may not be a bad thing). I've met many people who are worried for the future of Rails. They're not sure if Rails is a good technology to invest their time. For such people it may mean that in the longer run, they'll prefer to focus their education on the JS part more than on the Rails. We already see the increasing number of jobs ads requiring Angular or Ember.

This way, we'll see the trend started with rails-api growing in popularity.

2. Rails can adopt/recommend one of the JS frameworks.

It can be Angular or Ember. The first one has a huge growing trend recently. Ember is led by well-respected people from the Rails community (Yehuda). It's smaller overall but quite popular in the Rails world already.

We've seen a similar situation in the history of Rails, when Yehuda created Merb and then made it to Rails (oversimplifying a bit). Can the same happen with Ember? It's very likely.

What about Angular which is becoming the default JS framework? Can Rails recommend it? There's nothing in Rails that makes it hard to develop with Angular. But Angular is not the default choice, yet. DHH made some bold moves in the past, like making CoffeeScript on by default (thank you!). Can the same happen to Angular?

3. Rails will encourage JS frameworks but stays JS-framework-agnostic.

This is more or less what is happening already in the community. People use Rails together with many of the existing JS frameworks, with success.

4. All of the above

We can see DHH keep recommending [R]JS. The Rails core will make Ember the default choice, but easy to disable it. The community will keep using Rails together with everything.

The future

What is going to happen? I honestly don't know. Rails is doing fine-enough. It doesn't need to react in any way. We need to remember that it's not only about purely rational, technological choice. Rails was always famous for its marketing. We can see some unexpected moves, like coming up with its own JS framework.

What would I prefer?

Personally, the current situation is fine for me. I ignore the [R]JS way of creating the Rails apps. I'm allowed to create the JavaScript apps the way I want. Rails is good for API. I'm fine with any choice.

However, as I said, it's not only about rational choices, it's about the emotions. Do we want it or not, the Rails community is huge nowadays with new people coming every day.

If my main goal was to keep Rails hot for the new people, then I'd suggest choosing Angular as the framework that is on by default in Rails. That would bring a lot of love to the community. Angular is loved they way Rails used to be loved.  I personally don't really like the Angular way, but this choice will be good/easy for the new people for whom it's better to follow choices made by others.

In the meantime, other backend communities keep improving. Did you see PHP and Symphony2? It's a framework which is architecturally ahead of Rails (a topic for another blog post, probably). Did you notice how popular Scala is becoming?

Should we care about the future of Rails? Is it more pragmatic to be backend-independent and start learning more about other backend choices? Should we go the microservices way and have the app implemented in several backend technologies at the same time?

Many questions, lots of guessing :)

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UPDATE: I changed RJS to [R]JS in some places. It's not really RJS that is recommended by DHH, but SJR - Server JavaScript Responses - see http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3697-server-generated-javascript-responses