> I worry now that rails is past its zenith, and that starting a new company with rails today might be like starting a company using Java Spring in 2007. What

> I worry now that rails is past its zenith, and that starting a new company with rails today might be like starting a company using Java Spring in 2007. What this misses is Rails was the first framework that really got the web. It's not that Rails had new ideas, but that it took existing ideas and packaged them nicely for the web. Before that, you could either just wing it rolling your own in PHP or Perl, or else use Java because you were a "serious software engineer" that cared about well-defined architectures. The reason Rails was able to eat their lunch is by marrying just-enough-structure with the on the ground reality of developing web apps. Java frameworks just never got this until they saw how much people actually loved Rails and that in fact you could get more done with less. So all these complaints about Rails stagnating are overblown—Rails still gets the web, or at least I should say it still gets server-side web. It's not innovating the way it used to, because it is mature for it's use case. That doesn't mean it's not well maintained. The thing that will make Rails a bad choice is the thing that makes server-side web rendering is a bad choice. Obviously there are huge use-cases for single-page apps where Node really shines. There are also cases for microservices where Go really shines. Rails is not all things to all people, and it is no longer the new hotness, however it's core use cases aren't going away any time soon.