turbo VS morphdom

I also recommend checking out the docs for Stimulus and Turbo to familiarise yourself with all their features and the APIs used in this series.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo

Turbo 8 remove typescript without using JSDOC

Experiment using Turbo to drive front-end behavior: "Turbo 7.2.0 (currently in beta) allows you to define your own Stream actions which can be any JS code you want. By combining a custom Stream action or two with web components, you can essentially drive reactive frontend behavior from the backend stupidly easily. Loooove it! 😍 […] For a turnkey example, you could check out https://github.com/hopsoft/turbo_ready " —Jared White on The Spicy Web Discord

This handles disconnection (as could be done by any destructive change to the DOM, like navigating with Turbo or htmx, I'm not even talking about using the element in a JavaScript-heavy web app) but not reconnection though, and we've exited early from the connectedCallback to avoid initializing the element twice, so this change actually broke our component in these situations where it's moved around, or stashed and then reinserted. To fix that, we need to always call addSparkles in connectedCallback, so move all the rest into an if, that's actually as simple as that… except that when the user prefers reduced motion, sparkles are never removed, so they keep piling in each time the element is connected again. One way to handle that, without introducing our housekeeping of individual timers, is to just remove all sparkles on disconnection. Either that or conditionally add them in connectedCallback if either we're initializing the element (including attaching the shadow DOM) or the user doesn't prefer reduced motion. The difference between both approaches is in whether we want the small animation when the sparkles appear (and appearing at new random locations). I went with the latter.

If you think you have seen enough Rails magic, you are mistaken my friend. Rails have a new trick up its sleeve: Hotwire. And with the magical Turbo tool that comes with it, you can create modern, interactive web applications with minimal, or sometimes no JavaScript at all, providing users with an incredibly smooth experience.

There is also Turbo and the frameworks who adopt them, Ruby on Rails, PHP Symphony and possibly others that solves the same issue in the same manner as HTMX. And the choice for HTMX is only a personal taste in this, but you should definitely learn about this, this is as cool as HTMX!

Most controversially, the Turbo framework dropped TypeScript support altogether after assessing that strong typing was the culprit behind poor developer experience.

Turbo[0] has been solving this for years. Quite the contrary, front-end frameworks have started to think "sending JSON is good, but actually sending HTML could be great!".

DHH's presentation[1] during Rails World 2023 is quite interesting in that regard, I recommend you give it a go (start around minute 16). I am actually very excited with his vision of the web.

[0] https://turbo.hotwired.dev/

morphdom

And sure enough, it works! So what's going on here? Well, clicking the link invokes our reflex, which gets executed right before our current controller action runs again. It allows us to execute any kind of server-side logic, as well as play with the DOM in various ways, but with ruby code. Then, the DOM gets morphed over the wire.

It's super simple actually. And that is in large part to (Morphdom)[https://github.com/patrick-steele-idem/morphdom] which I'm using to compare the output of render() to what is already on the DOM. Morphdom will patch the differences.

I'm using morphdom to patch our DOM. Its a very simple library that compares two DOM elements and updates only the differences. It is extremely performant and does not even use a Virtual DOM, just the DOM you already have!

using HTML-diffing libraries like morphdom to efficiently update elements on the page

no it actually looks like morphdom is what i'm looking for.

It tries to morph into existing DOM (with https://github.com/patrick-steele-idem/morphdom). In case of fail, there is fallback to HTML replacement with outerHTML. All DOM operations after action occurs on component level, not the whole page.

Today, we’re going to build a live search experience once more. This time with StimulusReflex, a “new way to craft modern, reactive web interface with Ruby on Rails”. StimulusReflex relies on WebSockets to pass events from the browser to Rails, and back again, and uses morphdom to make efficient updates on the client-side.

Whenever the JavaScript on the browser-side receives new HTML, it will update the current page using a DOM-diff approach (using morphdom). So only DOM nodes that have actually changed between the initial page load and the updated HTML will be updated.

Updating the DOM is not slow. In fact, there are libraries and frameworks that emphatically reject the virtual dom approach. morphdom is one such example of a DOM modification library. Svelte's author Rich Harris has been proclaiming for a while that virtual dom is an overhead (see e.g. this article). Google's lit-html and lit-element do much of what react does without the virtual dom.