Apologies if this is a silly question as it may be to early to ask this, but I have seen very little about how action cable works or if you have to use standard rails views to see its benefits (which I have a feeling might be the case)
I have a Meteor Application which has been a bit of a disaster so I want to start over using ember however I’m not sure if I should use rails vs sane/sails for the backend if I want to keep some of the realtime features I currently have.
What happened to the meteor application? Curios to know the specifics.
Rails 5 will take a year or more to be released. And it would be just a websocket implementation, in ember side you could go with https://github.com/Wildhoney/EmberSockets and talk with any backend channel (node or ruby or anything).
Another alternative is to use firebase, do checkout this adapter GitHub - FirebaseExtended/emberfire: The officially supported adapter for using Firebase with Ember it would solve your problem.
If you want something that is like rails, but different you could check out the Phoenix framework. It has a similar setup as rails and uses Elixir which has a similar syntax to ruby.
FWIW Rails 5 is now in release-candidate stage, and I’m giving ActionCable a try for a new app that needs real-time updates. So far, I’m very impressed with how Rails has managed to make using websockets feel simple. I’m using ember-cable which has given me no problems so far.