LA Ruby Conf 2014 - As easy as Rails by Justin Searls

Rails came to prominence because it makes web development easy. So easy, in fact, that we're afraid to ask if Rails might be the wrong choice for our web application. Because before Rails, web development was so much more painful and difficult. It turns out that Rails is an awful choice for at least one type of web application: fat-client JavaScript user interfaces. We've been slow to admit this because it's hard to deny the comfort and convenience of the Rails ecosystem. But viewed more broadly, the Ruby ecosystem's client-side tooling has been completely outflanked in the past two years by the tremendous community focus on Node.js and Grunt. In this talk, we'll discuss why building single page apps with Rails isn't as easy as we might assume. We'll uncover the dangers of tangling our front-end UI with our backend-services in a single repository. Finally, I'll demonstrate some of the amazing things that development tools are capable of when JavaScript is treated as a first-class language and when (just like in Rails) we strive to make developers' work easier. Help us caption & translate this video! http://amara.org/v/FG2q/