[LRUG] Is turbolinks/jQuery still the dominant front-end approach with Rails devs?

[Emma Eyre]

Hi All,

We do a lot of recruitment for Ruby in the South East, most used / in demand is React then Angular or Ember

From: Chat [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On Behalf Of Tom Cartwright
Sent: 13 June 2016 11:00
To: Let me in... <chat at lists.lrug.org>
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Is turbolinks/jQuery still the dominant front-end approach with Rails devs?

Until recently, at Lost My Name we were using a collection of small jquery-based libs to provide validation, dom manipulation and the odd api call. We just had standard rails views and the occasional json endpoint. We didn't use the jquery-ujs or any of the javascript helpers. I tried to use them once but I was sentenced to a solid week of tea duty.

The jquery approach worked well but as our storefront grew more complex it was very hard to hold state and update views with state changes. We have replaced the front-end with a nodejs app that runs React/redux, with the magic isomorphic (I think the kids call universal these days) rendering on the server that everyone wants, allowing it to work without js on the client. I have not had much to do with the project but I have observed higher levels of developer happiness and the website seems to be up so thats two ticks in it's favour.

Tom

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Jon Wood <jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk<mailto:jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk>> wrote:
I think Javascript feels pretty bleeding edge all the time to me, simply because everything is in a constant state of flux. Maybe I just need to stop chasing the new shinyness, but whenever I start a new project with React I end up relearning half of what I did last time because its changed again.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 at 10:14 Sleepyfox <sleepyfox at gmail.com<mailto:sleepyfox at gmail.com>> wrote:
Interesting - React (the newest of the frameworks) is already more
than 3 years old. Others (Angular, Ember et al) are much older. At my
current client they're using React with Rails, and don't consider that
at all 'new' let alone 'bleeding edge'.

Modern work is moving to API+SPA, with the API in Ruby, Node or even
#serverless using Firebase or similar.

Is the Ruby community really this behind?

@sleepyfox


On 13 June 2016 at 10:04, Jon Wood <jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk<mailto:jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk>> wrote:
> I would say that it depends on the scale of your frontend at the moment. If
> you're building a web app which can function with just some generated HTML
> and the odd sprinkle of Javascript then jQuery is probably the way to go as
> you get all the benefits of Rails' gem ecosystem and years of tooling to
> build HTML quickly.
>
> If you're building a rich application then you'll probably want the extra
> structure provided by something like React or Ember, but you'll pay the
> price in initial bootstrapping of your application, and being somewhat on
> the bleeding edge. You do get the advantage of a proper API backing
> everything though, which pays off rapidly as your application gets larger.
>
> Finally, there's the option of having a REST API, and a Rails generated
> interface built on top of that. If you're web application is the only API
> client then I'm not sure I'd recommend that approach. If you need an API for
> other clients anyway then this can be a really nice way of working because
> every feature you build for any client requires API endpoints which can
> quite dramatically reduce the overheads in supporting the feature for other
> clients.
>
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 at 09:47 gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com<mailto:gvimrc at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Is turblinks/jQuery still the dominant approach to front-end development
>> in the Rails community or is there a shift towards Ember/Angular/React
>> backed by a Rails api?
>>
>> gvim
>>
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Tom Cartwright
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