It's not new in Rails apps actually; it's only new if you've been reading vocal blog posts (including the ones a few years back bashing design patterns etc). A

It's not new in Rails apps actually; it's only new if you've been reading vocal blog posts (including the ones a few years back bashing design patterns etc). At least for the apps I've been maintaining as a freelance, quite often they had services of some kind and other classic patterns. Many Rails developers I know come from a Java and/or .Net background, so this is not really a surprise :-)