[tomca32]

> Author could have installed next.js and called it a day.

Not a day, but probably a week of debugging. Each and every suggestion you made in your comment makes the deliverable tremendously more complex, is very expensive, will need ongoing maintenance, and is ultimately not needed.

Javascript apps are tremendously complex, why would do this if you don't have to?

[smokeyj]

Imagine you have a team of rails developers and you're asked to create a simple portal. Rails as a tool may be "overkill" but what does it matter?

If you already know Rails I'd say use that. If you only knew ruby then reaching for rails would be overkill. But if your business requirements need the features of Rails, learn rails instead of rolling your own framework..

[tomca32]

I completely agree with you, which is why I think that telling people to "just install next.js" is a terrible advice. If they are JS devs, experienced in next, sure, go right ahead, but I don't think that's the case here.

I'd be fine to just use Rails for something like that since I'm quite familiar with Rails, but I would never recommend it to someone who doesn't know it.

[smokeyj]

> If they are JS devs, experienced in next, sure, go right ahead, but I don't think that's the case here.

The author is clearly experienced in UI development. The app was already written in React/Redux. So honestly, yeah, just install next.js and fix your routes.

This solution would be a complete non starter for any professional project in terms of accessibility - there's a few issues screen readers would run into with this. Not only that, but good luck getting other developers to sift through your spaghetti code.

But the main thing is, the authors goals are somewhat pointless. If you don't want a SPA then just use jQuery. The author ended up using plugins anyways so the whole story was aimed at people who don't know front-end but latch onto this idea of javascript is baaad. Don't be that guy.

So to recap. If you don't know javascript, and you don't want to learn the standard tooling - please don't roll your own framework and blog about it.

Edit: looks like someone already commented this on his blog. This is all you need to know: https://dev.to/isfotis/comment/9c7k

[cuddlecake]

I am genuinely curious, what kind of Rails features can satisfy which business requirements?

I thought people use Rails mainly because they like it or are thrown into a team that already uses it.

[mickael-kerjean]

The ecosystem is even today the main selling point to rails