Intercooler.js – Simple AJAX Using HTML Attributes

http://intercoolerjs.org/

by thangngoc89 • 8 years ago

114 50 8 years ago

intercoolerjs.org

butz• 8 years ago

Is it just me or "Live Demo" actually doesn't send any AJAX requests?

thangngoc892• 8 years ago

Yes. All demos don't send real AJAX requests

greenhatman• 8 years ago

Yeah, I don't see it either.

I've used pjax with Laravel before, and it's trivial. Kinda does the same thing.

There is a Laracasts video explaining it here: https://laracasts.com/lessons/faster-page-loads-with-pjax

Demo page here: https://pjax.herokuapp.com/

utopcell2• 8 years ago

They are mocking the requests for the demos via mockjax.

e67f70028a46fba5• 8 years ago

yeah, I mock the ajax requests out so I don't have to host a server-side app

you can click on the code tabs and see what's going on, and it should be easy enough to map to whatever backend technology you are using

utopcell2• 8 years ago

Well done, simple and clean.

tobyhinloopen• 8 years ago

Great, another 60KB library (not including dependencies!) that can replaced with a few lines of plain Javascript without any dependencies.

thangngoc892• 8 years ago

It's 10KB gzipped (30KB non-gzipped) + jQuery. And that is pretty much everything you need.

joss82• 8 years ago

AND you can use Zepto (7KB) instead of JQuery.

I wouldn't call Intercooler heavy, au contraire.

niutech• 8 years ago

Even 10KB is way too much for a simple

  <a href="http://example.com" onclick="fetch(this.href, {method: 'POST'}).then(r => r.text()).then(t => this.innerText = t); return false;">Click me!</a>

invokestatic• 8 years ago

Seems useful when you've written a traditional server-side rendered app and you just want to "sprinkle" some AJAX onto it.

Back when I used PHP 5-6 years ago, I would use an "AJAX" helper built into the CakePHP MVC framework which would generate JavaScript for really basic AJAX requests. It was great for rapid prototyping and even production for admin panels and such. It's cool to see a similar, client-sided, framework-agnostic library like this with similar functionality.

sotojuan• 8 years ago

Is it me or this library gets posted on here every other month?

ggregoire• 8 years ago

This is fine if you build a website or a small app. But I wouldn’t recommend this approach for a more serious/big app. You will end up with unmaintainable soup.

scarface74• 8 years ago

Like another poster said. This would be useful if you’re using a server side rendering framework like ASP.NET MVC and you just needed a little bit of AJAX.

You would maintain most of your HTML, routing logic, etc. server side.

bobjordan• 8 years ago

My experience building a large flask app with jinja2 templating (large in that the app is ultimately a mix of ERP/manufacturing management/customer+supplier portal). The intercooler approach combined with flask blueprints and template folders is extremely maintainable. It is easy to comprehend all aspects of what is going on at any time. Can get a decent developer up to speed to be productive with it, within days. The vast majority of businesses would never need a heavier framework than this.

slow_donkey2• 8 years ago

I tried this library before but Vue does pretty much the same thing and is way more powerful. Additionally, starting out with Vue makes transitioning to a SPA much easier when needed.

I also encountered some bugs when mixing the 2 during a transition phase that broke my requests. If I had to start over again I would only use Vue starting with the drop in JS library (no webpack/preprocessing)

cfv2• 8 years ago

It may be worth mentioning that Vue is an entire framework with a crapload of features and caveats and whatnot and thus not exactly an equivalent of an especially flexible PJAX library which is the best definition I can come up with when defining Intercooler

kvczor• 8 years ago

Vue is not a framework, at least not in it's simplest form - drop in UI library.

I agree that Vue does much more than Intercooler and in theory, it could be seen as an overkill. But in reality, a developer will probably use it in conjunction with jQuery and then he might be better off replacing these two with Vue.js

pax• 8 years ago

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885980

dmix• 8 years ago

This has been reposted so many times by the author and by others that I can't help but finally ask.

Which hilariously begins with the statement:

> This has been reposted so many times by the author and by others that I can't help but finally ask. What's the point?

cousin_it3• 8 years ago

Sometime ago I had an idea that SPAs exist mostly because animated transitions between pages make managers happy, not to serve any actual user need. If that's true, maybe we could add support for animated transitions between server-side rendered pages, and make SPAs mostly go away.

Then I realized we could do that easily with a JS library! We could give some divs a "sticky-id" attribute, so they stay as part of the DOM tree when the page reloads, only their contents get replaced with the contents of divs from the new page having the same "sticky-id". That way there's no flash to white, and CSS transitions on sticky elements get a chance to fire. The whole thing could be handled by a generic onclick handler on each link. And the links would support opening in new tab as well, the JS would only fire when they are clicked in the same tab. I think that would be the most conservative way to have an SPA-like experience with a minimum of JS. Unfortunately I was too lazy to implement it :-/

EDIT: It's interesting that most replies to this comment seem to talk about whole page transitions, like fading out the whole page. But as I envisioned it, the key part of the idea is that we can get element-by-element transitions without writing custom JS, just by adding "sticky-id" attribute to some elements and letting their CSS transitions do the work.

detaro2• 8 years ago

https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks is pretty close?

cousin_it3• 8 years ago

Neat! Though the point of my idea is having animated transitions between pages, by replacing contents of sticky elements and letting their CSS transitions work as usual. As far as I can tell, turbolinks doesn't do that.

victor106• 8 years ago

Turbolinks is cool but it seems more tied to only a rails backend. Anyone know how to use it with Java?

cyberferret• 8 years ago

Turbolinks looks neat, but our Ruby app selectively includes CSS and Javascript snippets outside the <body> tag depending on what page is loaded (using :content_for declarations in our templates). I am guessing that Turbolinks will not work for us in this case, as the relevant external files will not be called on page load?

blattimwind• 8 years ago

history.pushState() aka pjax

schizoidboy• 8 years ago

JQueryMobile does this (automatically applying to all anchor links): https://jquerymobile.com/

Various page transitions can be set using `defaultPageTransition`: https://demos.jquerymobile.com/1.4.5/transitions/

Click the "page" button to the right of a transition for a demo.

spankalee• 8 years ago

There once was (still is?) a proposal for this: https://github.com/jakearchibald/navigation-transitions

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

I've done something not the same, but a compromise previously using the Window object's `beforeunload` event to fade out everything in the DOM smoothly, and then using the `beforeload` and `load` events to fade the new DOM back in. It's a bit of a halfway between having sliding transitions, etc. You might be able to simulate that even further than I ever tried.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/beforeun...

dwaltrip• 8 years ago

The primary benefit I see from SPAs is to enable pages that changes in a wide variety of ways without having to reload the whole thing at any point.

Funny thing, you can actually serve each page as a separate, stand-alone JS "app/page" and still get this benefit (e.g. each page in your app becomes separate webpack entry point).

johnnypopcorn• 8 years ago

You may be interested in http://barbajs.org/

alsadi• 8 years ago

I've made a similar declarative ajax

http://muayyad-alsadi.github.io/ajax-ops/

anonytrary2• 8 years ago

I'm missing something. What's the problem they are solving? It looks like they are offering a more limited way to make AJAX calls. Why?

To add -- it depends on jQuery? Yeah, I'm gonna have to pass. What this thing does is so small that I can't fathom why they would need to import all of jQuery just to provide a new way to do AJAX requests.

I'll just keep using React, it probably already solves whatever problem is trying to be solved here.

slow_donkey2• 8 years ago

It's supposed to be used before you reach for a full blown SPA framework when you just need sprinklings of AJAX.

anonytrary2• 8 years ago

when you just need sprinklings of AJAX

Then it is even more antithetical to import jQuery. I might as well use an SPA framework instead.

e67f70028a46fba5• 8 years ago

if it helps you can think of intercooler as HTML++, addressing the shortcomings of HTML (only supporting GET/POST, only allowing clicks/submissions to generate requests, only targeting full page replacements, etc.) rather than trying to be something like React.

It isn't right for everything, but it works well for me w/ a rails back end and there are some good theoretical reasons for using HTML if you like REST/HATEOAS. I linked a few articles up thread you can read if you are interested.

xaduha• 8 years ago

http://barbajs.org is superior in every way.

e67f70028a46fba5• 8 years ago

lol intercooler does a ton more than barbajs does with almost no javascript, they aren't even comparable

as w/ pjax or turbolinks, barbajs is a fine library, but it isn't trying to create HTML++ and there isn't much REST-ful theory behind it

i'm sure it's good for a lot of stuff though

e67f70028a46fba5• 8 years ago

i work on intercooler, you can AMA

as usual, a lot of negative comments from HN on the approach (which is admittedly against the grain) but I've used it for a relatively large and successful web app (rails back end) and it has worked out well compared to the SPA architectures I've had to deal with

i think the philosophical roots in REST/HATEOAS are worth considering, if you are open minded:

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

TheAceOfHearts• 8 years ago

Have you tried something like prmd [0]? And if so, what are your thoughts on it?

I used it at my previous job, but didn't find it gave me that many benefits, although there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it either. It just seems like a challenging problem to properly solve with any organization.

I was initially really interested in GraphQL and Relay, but when I tried em out I found em lacking for our small engineering team. I feel kinda similar with all these other alternative tools. I think if you have any API stability problems, you need to tackle it at an organizational level. The API team needs to communicate openly with the web frontend and mobile app team (which might include a cross-section of highly-mixed-specialty people) to make sure all changes are fully backwards compatible. I don't think the tools do a great job at helping you tackle complex issues.

[0] https://github.com/interagent/prmd

e67f70028a46fba5• 8 years ago

I have used swagger a bit for JSON API development, but didn't find it added much over just keeping it simple and reacting to client needs.

I typically split my externally facing JSON API out from the main application (which uses HTML/intercooler) because the use cases are typically so different: the JSON API needs to be general and abstract whereas the web application UI has a lot of fiddly little specific data needs that are better implemented on the back end, where you have full access to the domain model and a proper query language.

doomjunky• 8 years ago

The example code snippet on the website has a synthax error. The '!' in the comment embracement is missing.

Intercooler.js – Simple AJAX Using HTML Attributes

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