Wow, hi everyone! Was just about to walk over for the first day of RailsConf when a friend let me know we were #1 here! Honored!<p>I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!<p>When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!<p>These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.<p>If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! <a href="https://railssaas.com" rel="nofollow">https://railssaas.com</a><p>Happy to answer any questions anyone may have!
I haven't used Bullet Train, but I've found their "Teams should be an MVP feature" blog post [1] a really great overview of how to model team structures in relational databases before. Worth a read!<p>[1]: <a href="https://blog.bullettrain.co/teams-should-be-an-mvp-feature/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.bullettrain.co/teams-should-be-an-mvp-feature/</a>
I evaluated Bullet Train last year when building an MVP for a client. Ended up using Jump Start Rails instead. Main reasons:<p>1. The hybrid approach to iOS and Android apps with JSR were better than what BT had to offer<p>2. There was a lot less to learn about the mental model of how JSR was built via Bullet Train. It was basically pay, pull down, configure, and get going with JSR. BT has things like SuperScaffolding, an abstraction layer on CanCanCan, etc. I didn't want to have to ramp up on those to decide whether they were better than the alternatives.<p>YMMV of course. JSR is a paid app and IIRC BT was at the time too... but looks like maybe not anymore?
This might be a good place for a Java programmer to say thank you to the Rails community for your relentless mocking of Spring and Enterprise Java back in the days.<p>Java is wonderful these days, and seriously I think you guys are a one of the major reasons why Java is so great today.
If you are doing an MVP prototype or the code would be the client's problem once you're done with your consulting, such bulk boilerplate is fine.<p>I have extensively worked with Python and Ruby in past but my conclusion is that even though they ramp you up in the beginning but as the code base grows, it becomes harder to guess deeper in the codebase to guess what objects you're dealing with. Specifically in case or Ruby/Rails, the IDE's are of not much help as they're guessing/brute forcing the possible suggestions too.<p>The type hinting in Python is totally optional and I know you can have stricter linting rules and what not but I'd prefer a a little more statistically typed language for which I think go has the minimalism, won't let you over engineer. Other interesting promising candidates are Nim/Crystal.<p>So I can start my SaaS on such a Rails boilerplate but it'll be more of a liability of keeping up with the upstream codebase and my own but maybe that's my lack of confidence.
I love seeing Bullet Train progress. I've never used it, but I'm super eager to use it if I ever get the chance.<p>There's one more framework being built on top of Rails and I think worth mentioning - RailsUI: <a href="https://railsui.com/" rel="nofollow">https://railsui.com/</a>
Kind of funny that "starting you off with all the features that are the same in every product" is a good description of the original motivation for Rails itself. Which is not criticism, the goalposts have moved quite a bit the past few decades.
Bullet Train is so great. Even for non-saas apps, the sensible defaults make things so much easier. Things like adding new webhook handlers, api routes, complex models and views are only a command away. It's like rails for rails.
This doesn't really have the types of features I would personally want as someone who has done a lot of rails development in the past.<p>The types of things I tend to need to set up in any modern app is SSO integration, React integrated on the frontend, etc... These are annoying things I have to integrate every time I build something and are more or less industry standard at this point.
Building from scratch wastes a ton of time and I'm a big fan of starting with some working parts and customizing from there. I think with what's going on with AI it makes sense to use python more because all the researchers love python and make examples available through python notebooks. Then your tech stack is less split amongst many languages and there is less complexity and you can hire developers for cheaper. Ruby devs are fairly pricey because they all working in silicon valley-esque well-funded startups. There is a Django boilerplate provider that's really good <a href="https://www.saaspegasus.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saaspegasus.com/</a>. The guy behind it, Corey, is very responsive. All in all, it's probably not the worst thing to use Ruby, as long as you use less weakly-typed javascript :P
It'd be nice if there was a way to try the demo without signing in.<p>That said, this looks like a good product.<p>Are there other similar/competing things for Rails, and are there other competing SaaS-in-a-box things for other frameworks?