I maintain a couple of non-trivial Rails 2 apps, have just shipped a couple of Rails 3 apps and am preparing to write a Rails 3.1 app. I had always been using Sass and Haml for my views from the Rails 2 days. I moved over from shoulda to rspec 2 for Rails 3. All my solutions run partly on MRI/1.9.2 and have certain parts in JRuby (document parsing, search, etc). I had always been minifying and combining my Javascript. Sass with Compass/Blueprint took care of minifying and compressing my CSS. The only change that I am not comfortable with as yet is CoffeeScript. But after playing with it for a couple of hours I understand that this is an excellent choice. I have been a Python programmer before and significant whitespace in CoffeeScript or Sass does not bother me.
I am extremely thankful to the people in the community who are putting their time and effort to build such great software and essentially giving it away for free. I am personally both awed and humbled by the excellent work put in by all the individuals who directly or indirectly contributed to Ruby and Rails across all the versions. If not for them I would not have quit my day job. If not for Rails, I am pretty sure that I would not be enjoying my life, as much as I am enjoying it today.
The point is that Rails has grown up to the point where makes it simple to write complex applications. For small projects, these choices may seem to be an overkill. But trust me, when you put it into production and start getting traction you will thank Rails. I have built applications with Sinatra and Rack and assembled my own Rails environment using tons of middleware and a lot of glue. I know how hard it is to do it the right way and appreciate the fact that Rails makes it a cakewalk for us. I sure learnt a lot of Ruby but I would choose Rails any day as I know that there has been a lot of thought put in by the community to make it awesome.
I am extremely thankful to the people in the community who are putting their time and effort to build such great software and essentially giving it away for free. I am personally both awed and humbled by the excellent work put in by all the individuals who directly or indirectly contributed to Ruby and Rails across all the versions. If not for them I would not have quit my day job. If not for Rails, I am pretty sure that I would not be enjoying my life, as much as I am enjoying it today.
The point is that Rails has grown up to the point where makes it simple to write complex applications. For small projects, these choices may seem to be an overkill. But trust me, when you put it into production and start getting traction you will thank Rails. I have built applications with Sinatra and Rack and assembled my own Rails environment using tons of middleware and a lot of glue. I know how hard it is to do it the right way and appreciate the fact that Rails makes it a cakewalk for us. I sure learnt a lot of Ruby but I would choose Rails any day as I know that there has been a lot of thought put in by the community to make it awesome.