Word. Seems like they are going out of their way to avoid doing client side work even when it would be far easier to do so. Also seems motivated by the desire to keep Rails relevant, but without actually trying to evolve Rails towards being more useful for client side driven apps.
On the flip side, you have to congratulate them on what seems like really great results. I'm definitely in favor of doing what works and what you're comfortable with. I just don't think Basecamp Next Next will be written this way.
> Also seems motivated by the desire to keep Rails relevant, but without actually trying to evolve Rails towards being more useful for client side driven apps.
IME, there isn't a smoother way to implement a bunch of RESTish json endpoints hooked up to a database (resources) and have dependency management and compilation for your frontend js/css (via the asset pipeline).
There may be other frameworks out there that make serving up and delivering client-side driven apps easy, but I haven't heard of them.
On the flip side, you have to congratulate them on what seems like really great results. I'm definitely in favor of doing what works and what you're comfortable with. I just don't think Basecamp Next Next will be written this way.