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!
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!
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.
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! https://railssaas.com
Happy to answer any questions anyone may have!
In the past, I was jealous of the Ruby ecosystem with an extremely large community (the grass is always greener on the other side?). And, thinking the JavaScript ecosystem was left behind, but now I am hopeful that the JavaScript ecosystem has finally caught up.
I can totally confirm Bullet Train is an inspiration for many SaaS Boilerplates. I was personally inspired by Bullet Train to build Nextless.js [1], a Next.js based SaaS Boilerplate, bringing SaaS starter kits in Next.js/React/JavaScript ecosystem.
--- [1]: https://nextlessjs.com
If you're in the EU running a SaaS or developing with Rails you should at the very least check out his upcoming one in Greece.
Edit: To clarify I mean the marketing site linked here, not the starter template.
Too late - that train’s already left the station.
I'm trying to move a company that is now selling simple wordpress websites (and doing actually pretty well, do to their super expertise with design/graphic and marketing) to a 'higher' step with RoR, and BT seems something that may help them a lot approaching Rails.
Can anybody suggests resources, links, advice on how to start this new adventure?
[1]: https://blog.bullettrain.co/teams-should-be-an-mvp-feature/
I've had a hard time searching for patterns and tips for modeling common data/features for web applications.
0: https://www.derrickreimer.com 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20181001000000*/https://www.derr...
1. The hybrid approach to iOS and Android apps with JSR were better than what BT had to offer
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.
YMMV of course. JSR is a paid app and IIRC BT was at the time too... but looks like maybe not anymore?
I like the idea of jump start rails but would like to stay away from tailwindcss.
Java is wonderful these days, and seriously I think you guys are a one of the major reasons why Java is so great today.
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.
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.
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 don't understand, why are you guessing? Do you mean the parent objects of things you've written? Like ActiveRecord, etc. I would think that mental overhead is the same in any web+CRUD+ORM type of framework.
without types, all you have is the variable name to guess what it does.
IDEs help but there's only so much they can do.
There's one more framework being built on top of Rails and I think worth mentioning - RailsUI: https://railsui.com/
Rails is arguably “technology batteries included”, whereas this is more like “product batteries included”. There are many Rails sites that wouldn’t use these features, however there aren’t many Rails sites that wouldn’t use ActiveRecord or HTML rendering.
This seems like a great way to put it! At the lower level of abstraction, there's all of the technical stuff, but at the higher level of abstraction, you think more about the product and the business domain concepts.
The thing w/ Bullet Train is that so much work is done for you, that if you don't like an opinion or two that they hold, you really should start from scratch, as tearing things out will just take longer. Its the downside of having so much integration and configuration already done.
Not disagreeing, but wouldn't this be true of Rails itself? It's an opinionated framework. If you like those opinions, it's a great framework to use. If you don't agree with those opinions, you're probably better off using something else.
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.
Devise (which BT uses for authentication) handles SSO quite effectively, with tons of provider support.
This is relative.
> React integrated on the frontend
This is something that I don't want at all. Regarding the SSO, without reading the code, I'm sure you are able to accomplish it using devise (included in their framework)
That said, this looks like a good product.
Are there other similar/competing things for Rails, and are there other competing SaaS-in-a-box things for other frameworks?
What's still missing is some kind of aggregated review service or something for these. From the outside it's still very difficult to tell the difference between "well-maintained, production-ready thing that has been used by hundreds of real businesses" and "some rando's app they threw on github / are trying to sell".
There is such a huge difference in quality/maturity for many of these and that is literally all you are paying for. Still a tricky market to navigate.
there are also repositories, like https://railsbytes.com/, where you can peruse similarly pre-composed app templates of varying quality.
I would love to see them
Companies are regularly complaining it's getting harder to find senior+ Rails developers, which I think is a good problem to have.
