Ruby on Rails separate front & back

Question

I've been using Ruby on Rails since a little more than one year now and I've always do it in a casual way, I mean, everything in one place (front & back), using the standard .html.erb file populated by the associated controller method.

Otherwise, today in our project, I have the need to separate the front and the back end for multiples reasons (code maintainability / clarity, better architecture, more reactivity, etc...).

I've done plenty of researches, watch some conferences (1, 2, 3), but didn't find my solution yet. It looks like to be a question that comes often, but what is the best practice/tools to separate the backend and the frontend of a Ruby on Rails app?

I don't feel we need (yet) a huge JS framework like React/EmberJS/Angular/etc...

First I was thinking about something like Middleman/Jekyll and make the communication via JSON and API calls, but it seems like that it's not a good solution for dynamic website.

So is there a frontend framework that works well with a Rails API and which is easily maintainable and upgradable (add feature/extension to it like gems)?

Thanks for your insights.

Answer 1

A friend of mine wrote this great article/tutorial on Rails as a backend API.

http://blog.launchacademy.com/the-basics-of-building-an-api-in-ruby-on-rails/

As well as this tutorial on Rails/Ember.js

https://github.com/diegodesouza/Project-Planner-EmberJS

You can get an idea of how it's done and implement your preferred front end framework.

Hope it sheds some light on this question.