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Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

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Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#51

Post by tboyd47 »

disconnected wrote: post #19

I know they are trying to promote their own Front-End Framework (while trying to pretend that it isn't one), but with regards to the question on the title, my experience is: you can, but please, don't. It actually isn't THAT hard, but what will happen is that you'll end up reinventing the wheel badly, and you'll be chasing bugs and fixing platform inconsistencies for months. It won't be optimized and it won't work in…

I think at this point it really depends on the type of app, the browsers supported, and exactly what you mean by "without a framework." The sentiment you're expressing, although true to an extent, sounds like something I would have said 10 years ago.

It's VERY rare, almost unheard-of, to find any front-ends these days that are just HTML, CSS, and Javascript. That wasn't the case 10 years ago. IMO we don't know what a modern app would be like without a framework because it's just not done anymore. Even this post here uses Turbolinks, a framework.

It's also rare these days (in my experience anyway) that clients will ask for things that are simply not possible with HTML, CSS, and JS. Website design has started to get very same-y, and both HTML and CSS have gone through huge upgrades. Depending on the requirements you might be able to pull off a modern-looking design with just the basics.

Browser compatibility remains a problem, but most JS tools called "frameworks" don't exist to solve that one, but mostly to help structure large amounts of JS code. These tools simply did not exist at all back then, because people just didn't write that much front-end code. On SPAs, a lot of the code is only there to reinvent things the browser and the back-end could be doing.

If I was starting a new project I would probably go very light on the tooling.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#52

Post by libria »

s73ver_ wrote: post #28
libria wrote: post #16

Downvoting everyone answering the title question and not reading the article. You guys should be better than this. It's not about cowboying or NIH. It's about using a library called Turbolinks https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks to render static pages server-side and swap the content out with js.

It seems like most people are more interested in discussing the question posed by the title than discussing the product the article is advertising.

Is it a useful discussion, though? We all seem to already agree reinventing wheels is a waste of time.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#53

Post by GoToRO »

wanda wrote: post #43

It’s the wrong question to ask. Frameworks exist so that devs can stand on the shoulders of wheel reinventors/optimisers, and perhaps more importantly debuggers. If you’re going to build an SPA, you may as well use a framework. The question to ask is: should you build an SPA? Many complaints we as developers have, especially regarding browser history issues with SPAs, are issues that the end-user also experiences, bu…

Frameworks are used because they provide a lot of functionality for zero dollars. You then sell the SPA to the client including that functionality for non-zero sum. The part in which the site stutters and the like, comes after the client paid and it's too late.

There are also clients that want a website done in Angular. That's what they want and that's what you have to give them.

These are two use cases I found for frameworks and these are the reasons they exist.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#54

Post by pdonis »

libria wrote: post #44
pdonis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Downvoting everyone answering the title question and not reading the article. You guys should be better than this. Downvoting you for not paying attention to why people are answering the title question--because it was the title question in the article, which then proceeded to answer a different question. > It's about using a library called Turbolinks Which is not answering the title question of the article. The art…

> Downvoting you Which is fine. All contributions not engaging the content should be pushed to the bottom of the stack for the more interesting discussions to bubble up. > because it was the title question in the article, which then proceeded to answer a different question. > Which is not answering the title question of the article. The article should have been titled "Build a Single-Page Application Using Turbolinks…

> Clickbait is exactly why we should be dissecting the article and ignoring the title.

That depends on which topic one thinks is more important: the article's title topic, or the actual article's topic. I personally pick the former, and so, I suspect, do commenters who are focusing more on that than on Turbolinks.

> What's far more interesting to discuss is the approach: pre-rendered html dynamically swapped vs SPA's, tradeoffs, pros/cons, performance, security, etc.

Then by all means discuss it. But don't downvote people who have a different judgment of its relative importance than you do.

(Note: I see that the moderators have now changed the title of this submission in HN, to reflect the article's actual content instead of its title. However, I still think the article's title is fair game for discussion. But I'll leave the final decision on that to the moderators.)

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#55

Post by s73ver_ »

libria wrote: post #52
s73ver_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like most people are more interested in discussing the question posed by the title than discussing the product the article is advertising.

Is it a useful discussion, though? We all seem to already agree reinventing wheels is a waste of time.

I would say it's more useful than discussing the ad. Which is still to say, not very.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#56

Post by ronneybezerra »

Hi, as the author of this article I would like to thank you all for the discussion about the title. Thinking in retrospect, I see it was misleading indeed, but it wasn’t intentional, just a bad choice. So I decided to change it in order to better describe its content. Now it’s called Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience Without The SPA-framework Hassle.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#57

Post by lailsonbm »

sctb wrote: post #48
pier25 wrote: post #12

The title is misleading since this is basically a TuboLinks article and doesn't really explore the problems of building an SPA without a framework.

Thanks, we've updated it to a representative phrase from the article. We can change it again if someone suggests a better one.

The title of the post was changed. @sctb (or any other moderator), can you please update it in this thread?

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#58

Post by libria »

pdonis wrote: post #54
libria wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Downvoting you Which is fine. All contributions not engaging the content should be pushed to the bottom of the stack for the more interesting discussions to bubble up. > because it was the title question in the article, which then proceeded to answer a different question. > Which is not answering the title question of the article. The article should have been titled "Build a Single-Page Application Using Turbolinks…

> Clickbait is exactly why we should be dissecting the article and ignoring the title. That depends on which topic one thinks is more important: the article's title topic, or the actual article's topic. I personally pick the former, and so, I suspect, do commenters who are focusing more on that than on Turbolinks. > What's far more interesting to discuss is the approach: pre-rendered html dynamically swapped vs SPA's…

> > What's far more interesting to discuss is the approach: pre-rendered html dynamically swapped vs SPA's, tradeoffs, pros/cons, performance, security, etc.

> Then by all means discuss it. But don't downvote people who have a different judgment of its relative importance than you do.

Well, unfortunately I'm not convinced. I don't judge idea 1 as more important than idea 2, but I will vote based on my opinion of the article being more important than the title as I assume most authors intend to communicate more through the 1500 word defense rather than the 10 word clickbait. Obviously the article has more substance to grapple with. If the title's topic is interesting, I welcome new submissions that actually deal with it.

Re: Turbolinks: SPA-like Experience without the SPA-framework Hassle

#59

Post by sctb »

lailsonbm wrote: post #57
sctb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, we've updated it to a representative phrase from the article. We can change it again if someone suggests a better one.

The title of the post was changed. @sctb (or any other moderator), can you please update it in this thread?

Sure thing, done.
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