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I've played around with the new default frontend (no js build step at all!) and it's been an absolute joy. I was able to write basically babby's first Rails app and have it look, feel and behave like an SPA, and that's a wonderful thing for apps that need just a little bit of interactivity. While I've mostly moved on to Phoenix for my personal "weekend project" web needs, Rails is still a wonderful framework for getting an app off the ground fast.

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I use Rails as a portable, light, zero-conf frontend for data exploration. Just create the minimum viable rails app (--api), fill in the database connection, and you get a powerful REPL for exploring + rake to run transformations.

I have certainly turned to Rails many times to write a bunch of ActiveRecord models to play around with data in the console without ever running the web server.

There’s even a book about that! https://datavisualizationtoolkit.com/

Who would have thought that the “Data Visualization Toolkit” would be about Rails?

Turns out, it’s pretty sweet actually! rails new, g migration, baddaboom. I’ve done this a few times, but usually use chartkick rather than d3 as the book suggests.

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