In my seventh year with Rails I started allocating ’20% time’ to maintenance of Active Admin and related open source gems. As the universe of web technologies continues to expand and fragment there has been increasing acknowledgement at GitHub and elsewhere of the stresses on volunteer contributors and the consequent rise in the number of projects falling into disrepair. Active Admin at least now has an official 1.0 release and timely support for Rails 5.1.
On the plus side competition and the exodus from Rails has brought back innovation, most notably Rails 5.1’s integration of NPM, Yarn and Webpack. Beyond Rails in the wider Ruby community an object-functional style of programming is gaining popularity, championed by dry-rb and embraced by Hanami and Trailblazer.
This year has been one of considerable progress (and hype) around containers and microservices. Microservices are not without tradeoffs but Docker containers have proven themselves useful in both development/CI and production.
At my employer our codebase has reached 50kloc, now 60% componetized into gems, but a new joint venture has doubled our infrastructure and provided incentive to switch to Docker (and Elastic Beanstalk). Containerizing legacy applications is not always trivial, however, as adopting a 12-factor approach means simplifying and standardizing sometimes disparate logging and configuration solutions, as well as changing to process supervision in a stripped down POSIX environment instead of a full blown Linux host. Our monitoring stack now includes Pingdom, Airbrake, Loggly, PagerDuty, Skylight, (CloudWatch) and Librato. Moving CI to Docker has been challenging, with initially only CodeShip providing a SaaS solution with parallel tests each with multiple sets of containers.
Looking forward Rubyconf last November continued to raise hopes that performance and concurrency will be improved… eventually. Meanwhile there are numerous projects working on integration with compiled languages: helix with Rust, swig with C/C++, Loren Segal’s gorb with Go, and rubex. Crystal has gained attention as a Ruby-ish experiment on LLVM with its own MVC frameworks.
On the front end React may now be a ‘safe’ choice for front end development but possibly disruptive innovation continues with VueJS, CycleJS and Elm. The next twelve months will see either our further adoption of React on Rails or a shift to a different approach.