"Watson specifically brought up the trend towards single-page web applications, which Node.js excels at, and Rails has yet to fully adopt."<p>I'm considerably less bearish on Rails than this article. My go-to stack, especially for prototyping and rapid product development, is a Rails API and a React Frontend or React Native mobile client. There's a gem for every common problem that I'm going to run into, and this setup "just works" for 90% of what I need to do, which is some flavor of CRUD mobile and web apps.<p>I feel like I've given Node an honest chance, and it definitely excels for real-time and high-performance apps, but for a basic web app, development feels slow and cumbersome.<p>Is there something that I'm missing about Node? This article mentions it being great for SPAs. What makes Node better for an SPA than a Rails or Django API-only app? And if there is something that makes it better, are there frameworks to make Node development for basic CRUD apps more productive? I tried Sails for a bit, but found it kind of lacking.
> <i>Replacing it is a Java course, which will emphasize the Spring application development framework. This can be used in a variety of contexts — from back-end services, to mobile and web applications.</i><p>The cycle has completed. If there was anything that Ruby and RoR seemed like a salve to, it was Java (and perhaps C#/ASP) web frameworks.
I think JAVA is a good choice for a bootcamp, not because of any merits of its own, but because there are a lot more opportunities for beginner/intermediate level JAVA developers than there are for beginner/intermediate level Rails developers.
Also, starting out with something as opinionated as Rails might harm you in the long term. JAVA, once you're over it, leaves you with less things to unlearn.