Whether or not you've heard about Ruby on Rails (henceforth referred to as "Rails") in a while, or ever, it is one of the classic web frameworks. It advanced the state of the art of web development in an undeniable way, such that most frameworks since then have taken heavy inspiration from it, though I would personally argue that Rails still has some strengths that other frameworks have not really been able to imitate

When Rails first came around in 2004, web development was in a very different state than it was today. JavaScript was still pretty much restricted to the browser, since Node.js wouldn't come around until 2010, Java was being written without frameworks like Spring Boot to make it somewhat bearable, and the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) was in vogue, due to PHP being widely supported and easy to deploy

A lot of time has passed since the early days of Rails, however. Why would anyone use Rails, or even dive back into learning it after all this time? Isn't scaling an issue, since Twitter/X famously abandoned Rails in favor of Scala?

Personally, I still use Rails because in many areas where it used to lead the way, it is still king. Rails still has excellent documentation, that I would argue is still the gold standard for backend web frameworks, because of the wealth of examples, the API reference, as well as more traditional handbook-style guides. Rails also provides great time-savers that can be easy to overlook or forget about, such as the famous convention-over-configuration paradigm that saves you lots of time and effort, or generators that can quickly give your project structure and useful functionality, such as dynamically generated database migrations, as well as models, views, and controllers, where a lot of the code has been created for you

An underrated aspect of Rails that has saved me a lot of trouble with my side projects is that fact that Rails has a very easy to use solution to user authentication, in the form of Devise. Installing Devise, then running rails g devise, as well running a few command and adding two or three lines of code to your application, allows you to provide login/signup functionality to users! This sounds like a bit of legwork, but it is much easier and faster to implement than solutions I've seen in other ecosystems, such as Java, C#, JavaScript, or Go. Trying to implement authentication in Spring Boot derailed (pun intended) and made me give up on a side project, but in Rails, it proved to be a minor hurdle, with a very quick and satisfying solution

Rails has given a lot to its fans over the years, but it still continues to innovate and add quality-of-life improvements to the framework with Rails 8! Devcontainers make local project setup easy and reproducible, with preconfigured Docker containers, and many under-the-hood improvements, such as various tweaks to make the default SQLite database production-ready, as well as optimizations to drawing routes on application start, make Rails a better-performing framework than yesteryear. On top of these improvements, Rails 8 now has built-in authentication, though I still prefer to use Devise, myself, since it has been around for longer, and has more functionality than the new built-in auth solution

Rails may not be as popular among developers as it used to be, but I still love to use it for my projects, as its user-friendliness and abundant documentation and resources make it an easy choice for when I want to build web application quickly and easily (always!)