I am pretty sure. If you developing the next Basecamp these are essential. However, I rarely see Rails succeeding in other aspects of web development. I spent some time on trying to make Rails work for use cases that are not the perfect match for this ecosystem and failed. Yet, it is quite possible that there are millions on web applications out there, running on Rails happily. It is just not a great fit for things I do.
Basecamp's problems seem particularly well suited to a batteries included CRUD framework. There are plenty of problems out there that aren't CRUD-centric
- providing API for warehouse fulfilment for online retailers (peak load is 100x of base load, latency goes out of the roof before Rails just crashes with OOM)
- real estate indexing with huge amount of data (we could not make the full text search work reliably with Rails)
These were pre 6.0 and I am pretty sure many things changed since, I am just saying it is easy to run into these situations. The bigger your framework the more assumptions are built in that are hard to come by. It is good for Basecamp startups not good for non-Basecamp startups.
Image processing:
Spin up sidekiq workers and do your image processing in parallel in background processes.
Providing API for warehouse fulfilment with peak load 100x greater than base:
Run your Rails APP in any number of possible auto-scaling configurations.
Real Estate Full Text Indexing:
Use ElasticSearch alongside Rails to provide highly performant full text indexing/searching
I might be wrong but aren't real-time areas like WebSockets not really strong points in Rails? I do see that Action Cable appears to have improved, and I don't know at what point performance issues would get in the way, and I also probably don't know about some potential solutions. Should one choose Rails for an application with significant real-time / reactive functionality?
