Just kidding. I don't know, that's a pretty hypothetical question. We've heard nice stories about people who split up their frontend and backend into two projects, one completely Angular/Grunt, one completely Rails, where the Rails serves solely as a RESTful API and even user sign in and access checking is done through a remote service. It still sounds like a cool concept, but I'd want to have time to play around with it as a smaller experiment before really investing on a design like that. It would be a big shift in thinking, and again I don't know if it would make our lives easier or harder in the long run.
No, we never did that, although we sort of considered the idea when we transitioned from backbone. We're using https://github.com/FineLinePrototyping/angularjs-rails-resou..., its newly-added native Coffeescript class support is pretty nice. I'd considered talking about data modeling in this post but it was long enough already, and to be honest we're still kind of struggling with coming up with some really solid reproducible patterns here.
I agree about having a "core" module, I think we're probably doing a similar thing. Our original problem was just that everything was defined directly on the "core" module rather than on a submodule that was then required by core. Our "app" modules, which like you say are mostly just controllers, then just require the core module.
Just kidding. I don't know, that's a pretty hypothetical question. We've heard nice stories about people who split up their frontend and backend into two projects, one completely Angular/Grunt, one completely Rails, where the Rails serves solely as a RESTful API and even user sign in and access checking is done through a remote service. It still sounds like a cool concept, but I'd want to have time to play around with it as a smaller experiment before really investing on a design like that. It would be a big shift in thinking, and again I don't know if it would make our lives easier or harder in the long run.