React is Dead, Long live Reactive Rails

https://medium.com/@obie/react-is-dead-long-live-reactive-rails-long-live-stimulusreflex-and-viewcomponent-cd061e2b0fe2

by obiefernandez • 6 years ago

52 48 6 years ago

Been a little while since posting one of my own pieces on here, but have been hoping to get some discussion going about these new techniques that are popping up inspired by Elixir Phoenix's LiveView. Freshness in a field that has been pretty stagnant lately (server-based web apps).

Since writing the blog post I found out that there's another competing framework that might realize the design goals I'm describing in succint, self-contained fashion:

https://github.com/unabridged/motion

kfk2• 6 years ago

I can’t read your article as Medium says I reached my quota. I manage an analytics team and I am pretty annoyed with most dashboard tool out there (Tableau, PowerBI, etc), so I have been extending our internal python grizly library with server side components built as python classes and rendered “reactively” using htmx. The idea being that my team could easily build scalable server rendered apps from Jupyter notebooks. Most analytics requires server anyway to for instance do Excel extracts or in memory data transformations. It’s been an amazing discovery of simple but powerful patterns and it’s working. My question is why is this not more popular? Maybe I am doing something wrong?

recursivedoubts5• 6 years ago

My question is why is this not more popular?

I have no idea.

Maybe I am doing something wrong?

You are doing nothing wrong.

obiefernandez5• 6 years ago

You can open any Medium article in an incognito window. It's not a very secure paywall.

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

My question is why is this not more popular?

Resume driven development is a real problem in our industry.

recursivedoubts5• 6 years ago

My take: the fundamental problem is that HTML was never completed as a hypertext.

- Why should only anchors and forms be able to make HTTP requests?

- Why should only click and submit events trigger them?

- Why should only GETs and sometimes POSTs be available?

- Why should you have to replace the entire screen every time?

htmx tries to complete HTML as a hypertext, removing each of these limitations, so you can write advanced interfaces using plain ol' markup:

https://htmx.org

digitaltrees3• 6 years ago

I love it

obiefernandez5• 6 years ago

This looks super interesting, thanks for posting.

Can't help but wonder how much cooler it would be if only the attributes were not hx- namespaced. Is that not done for some technical reason?

imtringued2• 6 years ago

I always am irritated when people insist on disabling javascript. The fundamental problem is that HTML on its own is flawed and unusable. Even the most basic features that users expect will require a few lines of javascript.

Half of the webapps I make are just digitalizing existing paper forms. There is barely any javascript but the javascript that is there is absolutely essential. If the noscript warriors actually thought about ways of making plain HTML good enough that a JS free site was possible then I'd have sympathy for them. As it is right now they are asking the impossible. They would even complain about htmx even though it is exactly what they want.

SahAssar2• 6 years ago

I don't see any reasonable way for htmx to do error handling without writing your own JS, it has an example of 'ic-post-errors-to', but that only seems to be for error tracking and requires writing a whole other dialect of js (hyperscript).

Examples like https://htmx.org/events/#htmx:validation:validate also seem weird. Basically it replaces JS with it's own scripting dialect that is written inline in a attribute and that dialect does not even have syntax highlighting on their own site.

Is it actually more simple than writing the equivalent html+js when you add on all the real-world requirements?

chmaynard• 6 years ago

I'm surprised that someone with your technical sophistication is hosting their blog on a platform like Medium. Yuck!

harrisonjackson• 6 years ago

Having never used ruby outside of some rough puppet scripts but using both react and react-native daily for years - this was an interesting read. Always great to see someone excited about the future of technology - especially if they've been a part of it for so many years.

How does it handle connectivity problems in the SPA? Not that react does this out of the box - just wondering if there is some advantage to how the Reflexes do it.

Also the names of ruby libs are hilarious. CableReady, ActionCable, TurboLinks, and StimulusReflex.

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

Actually those are some of the more sensible Ruby libraries names - you have a pretty good chance of running `gem install {some-random-noun}` and it being a valid command. An XML parser named after a Japanese saw? Why not. A testing library named after a giant rodent? Even better.

Not that "redux" or "thunk" much better.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

Last time I used redux it was basically just "reduce" for react. If that name doesn't make sense then no name will.

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

Is this a joke? Are you just trolling? This article is just hype.

jaredcwhite• 6 years ago

Certainly the headline is clickbait-y, but the techniques described in the article are quite real.

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

There are techniques? I gave up after the fourth or fifth paragraph of hype. I suppose there are enough Javascript haters here to take the bait, but I've learned that when someone has to tell you how great something is a dozen times before they tell you what it is, it probably isn't.

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

Stimulus Reflex is picking up a lot of steam among Rails developers. It's not novel - it's the same approach being used in LiveView in Phoenix, Blazor in dotnet, and LiveWire in Laravel. (Details vary a bit, but basically DOM diffing over web sockets, with HTML being rendered on the server as opposed to heavy client side logic transforming JSON/GraphQL)

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

You managed to pique my interest more in 4 sentences than that entire article did. Thanks!

throwaway1892623• 6 years ago

Funny because you could probably say Ruby On Rails is dead for React developers

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

There are definitely more server-side options than front-end options. The approach here isn't necessarily just about React - the point is using web sockets and rendering HTML directly (sped up via DOM diffing) will replace heavy Javascript logic (whether React, Vue, etc) for most use cases.

throwaway1892623• 6 years ago

I really doubt it. Loading HTML fragments was the norm with AJAX. Part of the DHTML days. It makes more sense to have UI logic in the client.

AlexMuir• 6 years ago

Good summary.

One of the issues I find with Rails is that the 'old-way' of views, partials and a sprinkling of React is INSANELY productive. I've been trying hard to justify getting into Stimulus properly.

DHH is on a four-month sabbatical at the moment and my hope is that he's working on open-sourcing the framework behind hey.com, which Basecamp are calling 'new magic'[0]

There's something coming around object-oriented view components and client-size JS. I'm just not quite sure the perfect recipe has been found yet.

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275901955995385856?lang=en

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

Keep in mind that Stimulus Reflex leverages Stimulus, but you don't necessary have to get into Stimulus to get most of the advantages.

I suspect that the framework DHH comes up with will be very similar to Stimulus Reflex, or they may even roll that project into Rails/Stimulus.

jacquesc• 6 years ago

Wow, cool technology! But, I don't have any confidence that this gets adoption. And it has some major holes for when you want to add some rich user interface elements to your pages. And you lose out on a React ecosystem that's really hitting it's stride.

I got sucked into RJS, Turbolinks, Sprockets, and several other "cool" frontend technologies coming out of the Rails world that made my life miserable until I finally dropped them. Developer beware

bdcravens11• 6 years ago

The technique has been validated elsewhere: LiveView in Phoenix, Blazor in dotnet, LiveWire in Laravel, etc.

It's also not mutually exclusive. You can totally leverage React components when Stimulus Reflex isn't enough.

bsaul• 6 years ago

off topic, but is doing cocaine something you can officially brag about now in the US ??

obiefernandez5• 6 years ago

Having done cocaine in the past, sure, sure, why not?

antfarm• 6 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks the cocaine analogy is out of place in a technical article?

Excited about the technology though, thanks for sharing!

Snd_• 6 years ago

It is indeed very much out of place. But if you regularly do cocaine it isn't, if you know what I mean.

lucasmullens• 6 years ago

React is clearly not dead.
there is absolutely no technical need for Rails developers to use React anymore

The article is about React on top of Rails, not React in general. Leaving that out of the title makes this just clickbait.

hackerfromthefu• 6 years ago

Looks similar to .NET's Blazor running in server render mode, which is awesome and super productive.

React is Dead, Long live Reactive Rails

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