We're actually undergoing massive and dramatic improvements in the tooling, speed, and capabilities of web apps. Even the gap between now and two years ago is startling.
If you haven't given any of the newest tools a spin, you may not have noticed yet. For me, we crossed a tipping point in the past several months where an environment like Ember (with ember-cli as the toolchain) is actually nicer in every way than writing a more traditional server-rendered app backed by Rails or equivalent. And I say that as someone who suffered through the early days when there were serious growing pains as the whole ecosystem matured.
Now, the experience for both developer and end-user is a major improvement. It makes you appreciate how crazy and convoluted traditional web application are, given the way they need to thread state across pages. Rails is a testament to how far you can go despite those crazy constraints. But once those constraints are gone and you're writing a real, persistent client that's only loosely coupled with the server, you achieve a new clarity.
Up until very recently, the tooling all sucked hard, and so the net benefit wasn't very compelling. That has changed, and even if you're still not impressed just give it another year, because the improvements are still coming fast.
If you haven't given any of the newest tools a spin, you may not have noticed yet. For me, we crossed a tipping point in the past several months where an environment like Ember (with ember-cli as the toolchain) is actually nicer in every way than writing a more traditional server-rendered app backed by Rails or equivalent. And I say that as someone who suffered through the early days when there were serious growing pains as the whole ecosystem matured.
Now, the experience for both developer and end-user is a major improvement. It makes you appreciate how crazy and convoluted traditional web application are, given the way they need to thread state across pages. Rails is a testament to how far you can go despite those crazy constraints. But once those constraints are gone and you're writing a real, persistent client that's only loosely coupled with the server, you achieve a new clarity.
Up until very recently, the tooling all sucked hard, and so the net benefit wasn't very compelling. That has changed, and even if you're still not impressed just give it another year, because the improvements are still coming fast.