chokidar VS stimulus_reflex

For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.

tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library

> It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.

As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

At the end of the day, ironically, Nodemon does not even implement file watching functionality. It is a thin wrapper around chokidar (see source code), and the way it is being used is neither efficient (CPU and your battery usage) or performant. So it is not a false argument, just perhaps not the most appealing.

for file watching, it might use something similar to https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar

First, we need to install chokidar to enable watching and automatically refreshing our files.

Then there are stack-specific libraries: StimulusReflex for Rails, Phoenix LiveView, Laravel Livewire, Unicorn and Tetra for Django, Blazor for .NET, … and the list goes on.

Morphing and the concept to do refreshes after broadcast are hardly new. Stimulus Reflex has employed morphing to update the page for years, and CableReady::Updatable, which allows listening to model requests for refreshes, has also been around for a while. But I am excited to see these concepts being adopted in Turbo and becoming more mainstream.

Stimulus Reflex (Ruby), which predates Hotwire, also deserves a mention, though most of its momentum seemed to stall when Hotwire was announced.

https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Hi there, not crazy experienced on the topic but after some research i made for personal reasons i found https://mayu.live/ whick looks interesting (and as mentioned already https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/, seems to be close to Liveview)

StimulusReflex Docs pretty easy to use and release 3.5.0 is coming soon.

However, the timing may be a little off. In some ways, it feels like the "Express" way of developing for the backend is dying. We are seeing tools that blur the line between backend and frontend, trying to unify how we develop web applications. Tools like Phoenix LiveView, StimulusReflex, Laravel Livewire, Remix, Next.js, and many others are being developed.

You can also learn Rails and StimulusReflex

Reading the article and the source code, I learned a ton of stuff, as always. In his implementation, Louis is using StimulusReflex (built on top of Stimulus) to achieve this. I was curious about several points:

Now that we know that our backend is working as it should, let’s wire up our stuff. I’m gonna skip on Stimulus Reflex setup and configuration and dive right in. You can easily follow the official setup or, if you use import-maps, follow @julianrubisch’s article on the topic. I also know that leastbad has been working on an automatic installer that detects your configuration and sets everything up for you if you care to try it before the next version of SR gets released.