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Is there a convincing Stimulus vs. React-Rails post anywhere?
Stimulus is paired with Turbolinks, which doesn't play well with almost anything in the JS ecosystem.
Alpine.js is worth a look as well [1]. I've been working with it as part of the newly christened "PETAL stack" [2] of Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine.js, and LiveView. [1] https://css-tricks.com/alpine-js-the-javascript-framework-th... [2] https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/021-tailwind-css...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like these libraries but have the same concerns. One alternative that might be worth a look is htmx (the new library based on intercooler.js): https://htmx.org/
Htmx is more like all „we try to solve everything for you but fail“ solutions. The good part of stimulus is that it is only a binding library, no automatic content refetch etc. solution
Is there a convincing Stimulus vs. React-Rails post anywhere?
React (and React-rails) moves rendering / state / logic clientside. You can use tools like react-rails to more easily pass data from your Rails controller to your react components (basically conveniences to create props from instance variables).
Stimulus doesn't handle rendering at all. It's intended to be used for small little "sprinkles" of JavaScript (think things like: showing / hiding content, toggling classes, basic event handlers). If you used to write jQuery snippets to wire up a click event to run ~5-10 lines of JS, then you might look at Stimulus as a more modern implementation (es6, mutationobserver, etc). Stimulus plays nicely with Turbolinks since it needs existing HTML (servered rendered from normal Rails views) to attach to.
You're basically looking at two diverging paths: do you go down a JS-driven SPA application with React (or some kind of hybrid where you have React do parts of the page) or do you opt for Basecamp's "I cant belive its not a SPA" approach with Turbolinks, server-rendered HTML, and Stimulus for small interactivity.
Here's a talk I gave at the London Ruby meetup about Stimulus and in what contexts you might want to use (or not use it): https://assets.lrug.org/videos/2020/september/matt-swanson-s...
A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have Are they implying one shouldn't use it if you don't have any HTML already?
To understand their philosophy, see DHH's blog post announcing Stimulus 1.0, https://m.signalvnoise.com/stimulus-1-0--a-modest-javascript...
Stimulus has a very small surface area, but I find it really enjoyable to use when combined with Turbolinks. My only complaint/comment is that some of the HTML that I need to generate ends up being littered with so many data attributes, especially when combining multiple Stimulus controllers/behaviors. Has anybody found a clean way around that in Rails templates?
Basecamp seems to use liberal newlines / spacing when creating html tags (like one line per attribute) so that might help.
Server-side "component partials" still don't have a great story, but view_component is one emerging option.
Stimulus has a very small surface area, but I find it really enjoyable to use when combined with Turbolinks. My only complaint/comment is that some of the HTML that I need to generate ends up being littered with so many data attributes, especially when combining multiple Stimulus controllers/behaviors. Has anybody found a clean way around that in Rails templates?
Once the boundaries of your server-side parts for something are congruent to the client-side parts, you have reached the nirvana state of wondering, "can I extract & package these into a library and share it?".
This is general advice for all development but particularly and specifically true for Rails devs.
A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have Are they implying one shouldn't use it if you don't have any HTML already?
Alpine.js is worth a look as well [1]. I've been working with it as part of the newly christened "PETAL stack" [2] of Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine.js, and LiveView. [1] https://css-tricks.com/alpine-js-the-javascript-framework-th... [2] https://thinkingelixir.com/podcast-episodes/021-tailwind-css...