My team is thinking about setting up an architecture where we use Spring Boot for the backend API and Ruby on Rails for the frontend web application. The Spring Boot service would handle database caching and provide REST endpoints for business logic. Rails would be responsible for the user interface and admin dashboard features.
Has anyone worked with this type of mixed technology stack before? I’m curious about potential challenges with things like deployment complexity, team coordination between different languages, performance bottlenecks, and how well these frameworks communicate through APIs.
I’d really appreciate hearing from developers who have actually implemented similar setups in production. Real world experiences would be more valuable than theoretical suggestions about alternative frameworks.
I’ve done this setup before at my last company - Spring Boot for payments and inventory, Rails for the customer storefront. Biggest pain point was keeping data consistent when traffic spiked, since each service had its own database pools. Fixed it with circuit breakers and retry logic between services. Auth was a headache too - validating tokens across both apps meant we went with JWT and a shared secret. Performance was solid after we tuned the API calls and added proper caching. Deployment’s definitely more complex though. We used Docker with separate CI/CD pipelines for each service, so coordinating releases took some planning.
we tried a similar combo b4! deployed with django tho - big hassle managing separate containers. releases were tough to sync, and team speed slowed down switching from ruby to java. just somethin to think about!
Interesting setup! why’d you go with rails for the frontend instead of react or vue? and how are you planning to handle auth across both services? also curious - does your team already know both stacks well?