html-over-the-wire VS stimulus-use

At the heart of Turbo is "HTML over the wire" (for which HOTWire is an acronym), which means the server sending HTML fragments for partial page updates, which (here's the big win) eliminates the need for client-side state management. There are lots of tools taking this approach now.

html-over-the-wire

I looked at several html-over-the-wire frameworks during the last weeks and wrote down my opinionated perspective.

I think I will go with htmx.

If you want to know more: https://github.com/guettli/html-over-the-wire

You can see that I added a dependency here: stimulus-use.

“stimulus-use: Add composable behaviors to your Stimulus controllers, like debouncing, detecting outside clicks and many other things.

Actually, Stimulus is pretty cool because you can compose multiple pre-built behaviors into one Stimulus controller, for a sort of functional approach to component behaviors. The tradeoff is that a growing web of Stimulus controllers (plus HTML data attributes associated with them) can become complex and hard to understand.

The stimulus-use project is a collection of reusable behaviors for Stimulus. If you are familiar with React, this project is similar to React’s hooks system, but for Stimulus controllers.

To make using the IntersectionObserver API easier, we will add the wonderful stimulus-use package to our application. This is not a requirement, but it does simplify the code a bit.

Finally, as we recently added the Stimulus-Use library to our project, we made sure to upgrade it to current beta which supports Stimulus 3.

As you’ll see below, I am importing useClickOutside from stimulus-use, it’s a great library with small, composable helpers, I urge you to check it out!

For example, we have a few ”live search“ fields, backed by back-end Fetch requests, on some pages. The live search function was usually triggered by the keyup event and Cuprite was such a fast typewriter that it frequently sent multiple requests almost at once. If some of the responses got a bit late or out of sync, the front-end JavaScript code began hitting issues. We solved this by adopting a technique called debouncing and, frankly, we should have done this since the beginning. By the way, we used the useDebounce module from the marvelous Stimulus-use library to achieve this.