Why Your Next App Should Be Written with Rails, Inertia, and Svelte

Tech stacks are often more about fashion than fact.

People chase, not what’s wise, but what’s popular - they seem to believe that by imitating the tech stack of some tech giant, they will somehow gain a measure of their success. They forget, of course, that such tech companies used readily available technology to grow - and only began using homegrown, esoteric tools once they reached huge scale.

At Durable Programming, though, we’ve begun using SvelteJS, InertiaJS, and Ruby on Rails for our inhouse applications - and it’s quite a powerful combination.

SvelteJS is a powerful frontend framework - it possesses much of what people love about React, but because it shifts much of the work to compile-time, it’s faster. Ruby on Rails is a powerful full stack framework - making some types of problems easier to solve.

This, of course, is not a new thought - many applications use a combination of a Ruby, Node, or Python backend with a JS frontend app. InertiaJS, though, makes this combination surprisingly natural and easy to work with.

Of course, developer ease is only part of the equation.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve found InertiaJS, SvelteJS, and Rails to be a highly effective combination for productivity - making it possible to create useful web applications that solve important business problems at a faster rate.

We’re working on an app template for creating new apps with Rails, InertiaJS, and Svelte - complete with Docker, docker-compose, nix, and a bunch of other developer-friendly tools built in.

Make sure to star our repo on GitHub if you’re interested:

Further Reading

Evil Martians - the company, not malevolent visitors from the cold and dusty fourth planet from Sol - have a great writeup on why InertiaJS is a great fit with Rails:

The templatus-inertia project on GitHub has a good example of a baseline Rails/InertiaJS app: