My Rails 8 opinion

Here is my 2 cents after 10 years with Rails and 6 months with Rails 8 in production.

Rails is removing stuffs!

The most surprising part is probably that they are proud of removing parts in a brand new version.

I view it as an excellent sign of maturity.

The subtitle of Rails 8 is “no PaaS required”, but they could have also said : “No React required”, “No Redis required”, and so on.

What a relief.

Any shiny new framework is proud about “what’s new under the sun”, not “what’s deleted to simplify devs life”.

The first excellent part is what didn’t move.

The domain swallows all the complexity, as it did 15 years ago.

The controllers are still the same, very boring and efficients.

Omakase is a poetic way to say “if you don’t like feature A, D and F, I just give you the ability to skip A, D, F, while keeping B, C, E”.

I was surprised the number of comments in this Reddit thread about Rails unpopular opinions.

The old times where everybody found “default Rails” to be the best option is now quite far away.

So personnally I skipped the default db configuration, I skipped the assets management (I use Vite), I skipped Hotwire (Unpoly is far better).

I didn’t use the default auth generator, authentication-zero being far ahead of it.

I don’t use Trix, Tui editor being a lot more efficient to handle HTML generation.

I kept every other part of Rails, because I felt good enough with it.

And I feel more productive than ever.

YMMV.

Now PG can handle most of the classic stuffs. I will write an article about it soon, but here is what my local Rails 8 db look like:

freskrweb_development
freskrweb_development_cable
freskrweb_development_cache
freskrweb_development_errors
freskrweb_development_queue
freskrweb_test

Personally, I still miss the freskrweb_development_analytics, but you have the idea : systemic features are backed by PG itself, and it’s a relief.

Rails 8 is “the one person framework”, now more than ever.

React-based framework means more complexity and more code, and it’s even worse if it’s AI-generated.

Rails 8 has shortened distances between idea and production, while keeping complexity and productivity manageable over the long term.

That is the right path.