| Two things happened: Twitter switched to the JVM and posted a talk getting a few high profile Ruby consultants to do the same. A lot of the people that I knew from that time had already switched to Sinatra for their non work related projects. As simple as Rails was compared to what came before it (J2EE), it was still complex in ways and people felt Sinatra was simpler. When node.js started gaining traction and people realised that they could write front-end and back-end both in the same language, people went in troves to node.js. All popular Ruby projects like passport and Passenger had a node.js version. Some others had a node equivalent quickly put together. Some rubyists that I knew also took the route of writing everything in (a very Ruby like language called) coffeescript and compiled it to js before running it on node although this didn't last long. For me as a kid, Rails taught me a lot of things: MVC, db migrations,relationships, HTTP and REST for which I'm grateful. But I don't see myself using Rails again because we have tooling now that makes me more productive or atleast feel that way. |