Since those dark times, a few tools have cropped up and improved the landscape. As I mentioned before, I have recently been working on a project that I wanted to have a stand-alone front-end app for (inb4 single page apps don't work). I wanted to avoid the messes I've encountered with JavaScript-heavy Rails apps and keep Rails as API-centered as possible. Once I had a functioning back-end, I knocked together a rudimentary front-end with React using Bower to manage dependencies and Jekyll to compile it all down to a static page.