I remember fondly when RoR was the hottest thing, so elegant and easy to understand, but I haven't touched it in ages. Is it still good compared to the more up-to-date stuff? Is it still relevant?
Absolutely! I switched from PHP to Rails in 2008 and I've been able to upgrade all of the relevant projects to modern 7.1. Lots of changes/maturation along the way, but all in the right direction. Still best web framework for fast prototyping in 2023. I use Rails every day. Not the best for high concurrency or system tasks, but great for expressing maintainable business logic and working on web apps in teams.
Yes. Hotwire is an incredible productivity booster. There can be some lag on waiting for the server to respond in some scenarios but I just drop into Stimulus and perform some manual "optimistic" UI updates -- usually in a just a few lines. I create all my new Rails projects with Tailwind and esbuild and have had no issues whatsoever. The new authentication stuff (generates_token...) is also a huge time saver.
