Ruby on Rails

Generally very large and apps built after 2013 have moved on to frameworks like Backbone, React, Ember, etc. 

For a simple or prototype app, RJS is totally appropriate. And as a beginning developer it's totally a great idea to learn how jQuery and Turbolinks works. 

On a larger app, coding like that you will wind up with "jQuery soup" which in my experience never really works out to build a maintainable codebase. 

Rails doesn't really have a robust "javascript solution" other than RJS, taking the agnostic stance that it is a back-end technology. Having said that, the latest version of Rails had a strongly-worded stake in the sand statement about Rails & the future of Javascript, in which a package manager (Yarn) was made the default. 

But even with Rails moving in that direction, it still means if you want to build a large, robust front-end app you'll probably be picking a JS framework or writing a bare-bones one yourself (or using a bare-bones one, like Backbone, which is what I prefer.)

What you are doing with RJS/UJS is the way to go for your purposes for a small app. 

-Jason

If you'd like to reply by encrypted email you can find my public key on jasonfleetwoodboldt.com (more about setting GPG: https://gpgtools.org)