react-rails

Given that major companies have been built on what was not seen as cutting-edge stacks at the time of conception -- Facebook on PHP, Github on Rails -- maybe Rails could still be the sensible choice? RoR might itself not be fast, but on the upside, its community seems to be pretty forward-facing in building plugins for client-side tech, i.e react-rails [0] [0] https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails

Yes, you certainly can. This is actually a topic that I've been exploring for a little while now. http://www.openmindedinnovations.com/blogs/3-ways-to-integra... is a decent, although old article on the three different ways that it can be done. I personally recommend https://github.com/shakacode/react_on_rails as the solution to this issue. Instead of merely providing you with React and React only like https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails does, it welds Node & Rails together to enable you to use the latest and greatest of the javascript ecosystem. As for the benefits of doing so, having started my web development journey with Rails, I like to think that Rails provides an excellent convention for Backend MVC & ORM while Node gives you access to up-to-date javascript libraries & frameworks. Combining Node & Rails allows to you to exploit

I was in quite the same situation, Angular 1.x was quite hard to grok at first. But React just "clicked" instantly. For integration with Rails, I found https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails to be quite useful. It integrates the Babel transformer for JSX into the asset pipeline and brings a couple of helper functions, so no additional setup needed. You start writing your components, "mount" them via the helpers in standard .erb templates (or even without the template directly from a controller action), done.

"Once you start doing your UI with it, you pretty much need to make the entire thing use react to really benefit from its model." In my experience React is quite ideal for cases where some parts of a site or an app need dynamic behavior. I'm currently working on an e-commerce platform's admin panel, and for us a complete rewrite would have been nearly impossible. With React we can keep the old HTML + jQuery codebase, and implement/refactor stuff as small or as big as we need (e.g. a live-search component or a whole new dashboard view). We're doing something very similar to this: https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails#rendering--mounting

React Rails[1] works fine: you just get React, and it's difficult to integrate other shiny React-associated stuff like Redux, but it makes it incredibly easy to build out an app, or even just sprinkle components throughout an existing Rails app. It's dead simple to get started, and I've found it generally Just Works; the whole team I work on has been using it for the last 4-5 months without any issues. Just add to Gemfile -> it sets up a components folder + a file that imports the file tree -> then optionally set initializer options (like include React Addons, or use stage-0 stuff). All exposed globals though, which is a pain, but that's generally expected with the asset pipeline unless you're very disciplined. There's a pretty complete tutorial, but it's a bit out of date + uses CoffeeScript rather than JSX - I made a copy of the origina