Given that you're coming from Rails you may be pleasantly surprised by DotNet Core 5 (C#). In addition to the static typing, by choosing an MVC project with an

Given that you're coming from Rails you may be pleasantly surprised by DotNet Core 5 (C#). In addition to the static typing, by choosing an MVC project with an Entity Framework (EF) backend you get something similar to active record, with full-stack views where your database can be connected to your frontend if you like, scaffolding, migrations, seeding, relationships with navigational properties defined in your models, routing by discovery/convention, validation by model attributes, strongly-typed views, out-of-the-box client-side validation based on the same attributes, and server hot reload ('dotnet watch'). Through generic types and EF you don't need to write ORM or serialiser/mapping stuff, and at the same time you gain self-contained releases (no framework installations needed on the server) and a very performant stack with great language features. Core may come from Microsoft, but it's free, open source, cross-platform, fast, and supported (plus Visual Studio has a free community edition). It's seen as an enterprise thing, but is a fantastic option for small projects too.