© Business Class Blog
The official Rails answer to building modern user experiences is to adopt Hotwire, a suite of front-end technologies to build applications with minimum custom JavaScript. But as good as Turbo and Stimulus is, they cannot fully replace React and Vue in terms of interactivity and eco-system. So what to do?
Most Rails teams today are likely using Rails in conjunction with React, a library that for better or worse won the popularity contest on the web. On the other hand, an increasing number of people are adopting Hotwire and embracing classic server-rendered views (that don't have to change to stay relevant).
Personally, I wasn't the biggest fan of single page apps for a very long time. As a user, their loading times left a lot to be desired (leaving me stranded in countries with subpar connections), and as a dev, I hated the front-end to back-end dance, especially writing GraphQL resolvers.
Interestingly two things happened. Once pure SPA frameworks adopted server side rendering to the point that Next.js is now server-rendered first and SPA second. People finally realized that server-side matters. And from the other side of things, GraphQL got some serious alternatives like Inertia.js and Superglue.
My personal take is that I really like Hotwire and I do want to use it for most things. But I am unsure of building a highly interactive parts with it. Sure, a Stimulus controller is just plain old JavaScript and people build whole majestic editors with just plain JavaScript. But it's probably not the best experience.
And there is a vast front-end eco-system of things we are not utilizing. That's probably the saddest part. So what gives?
When I was working at Phrase we had a standard Rails + Hotwire application but the translation editor was a Vue application that Rails was just serving. It was also built by a separate team of front-end specialists. I think that worked really well. And I want Business Class to be like that.
What does that mean? It means the base template will embrace Hotwire in full. There is no need to bring React, Vue or Svelte into it. But it also means there should be a really easy way to add and build React and Vue components once you need to.
Nobuild is becoming popular. A big part of me wants that simplicity. But I am not convinced we are there, especially considering libraries like React. So I am hesitant to fully switch to Importmaps. And I am also considering Vite again. It gets better every day.