Rails might have deteriorated in ease of use, but I cannot imagine it being worse than Java EE was in 2004. Modern Java EE is a world of pain, even simple apps are difficult to build. The entire front end stack is antisocial, difficult to extend and anachronistic.
I don't think anyone working with a modern java web stack could read this post about rails 'being like java' without a dark chuckle.
I don't think the thing that will be to Rails as Rails was to Java EE exists yet though. The competition has merely caught up, perhaps a little ahead on some fronts and a little behind on others. But there is nothing that is clearly much much better. Things like Meteor and Opa are a step in the right direction, but they don't go far enough (yet).
Does anybody remember this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
This is not the original Rails video, it's the second one I think, but they're fairly similar (couldn't find the original). Back then when I saw the first Rails video I remember finding it amazing. Now it's just boring.
I think rails is better than the competition if my goal is to make fairly standard websites. It would be a rare exception where I think something else is more suitable.
The thing is these frameworks have caught up so much on the expressiveness front that their other advantages can easily start to outweigh the small advantage that Rails has there. But if you are building a low traffic CRUD site (like most sites), then yeah use Rails. If you are building say a chat application, I wouldn't use Rails.
"If you have high traffic it might make financial sense to forgo some productivity and choose a framework that can run on lower amounts of hardware"
I've worked on numerous sites that are in the top 1000 traffic wise according to alexa. I never once felt that it was worth moving them off of rails/ruby. You are probably talking about the top 0.01% of sites or even lower than that.
No, certainly not! I think Rails is fine for 99% of web sites, and probably the framework that has the highest percentage of sites where it would be my top choice. But Play is also fine for lets say 98% of web sites. Rails even works fine for things like chat applications, but there it would not be my top choice (at least not for the component that serves the messages). That's all I'm saying. Rails is my favorite framework, I just don't think that it is better than everything else in every respect.
You are probably looking at this from a different perspective. Of course it's not worth moving an existing site off Rails if it is already done, or when you'd have to learn a completely new language and framework to do it. But if you are at the start of a project, and you already know e.g. Scala and Play, the situation may be different.
But, this isn't Sinatra vs EE6, its Rails vs EE6, so its not a proper comparison.
To compare with Rails you've got to look at other parts of EE6: JSF + CDI + JPA, which is an awful mess. JSF by itself is enough to kill its usability for many modern applications, the amount of state JSF carries around is ridiculous.
In my opinion if I need an entire separate framework (or container) to manage it, I think its broken. I've switched to Ebean for Java ORM and am vastly happier now.
JPA also gets the award for the worst programmatic query building API I've ever seen. As a result it seems like the majority of people just use JPQL strings which is really annoying as its also SQL but not quite SQL.
(I'm not being critical; I'm really just curious and would like to learn about different frameworks).
Better yet, what framework do you believe offers all of these things and does a significantly better job at decoupling than rails?