morphdom VS intercooler-js

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.

An early version of Htmx was in fact based on jQuery (https://intercoolerjs.org).

I used HTMX since the intercooler days [0] but the stuff you can make is rather limited. Also you still need the JS to deal with a11y things like expanded state (or hyperscript, apparently).

If you have a lot of components to implement, everything requires thinking.

I really love it for simple applications though. Resist implementing a complicated menu, live notifications, an editable data-table and such non-web-native things and you can create the fastest CRUD app ever.

And you will need another client, but that's not really an issue if your view model does not contain non-public data (it shouldn't), as you can convert it to JSON at the same endpoint and call it an API.

[0]: https://intercoolerjs.org/

to an extent, there was `jQuery.get` but it wasn't tightly integrated with HTML

the original version of htmx was intercooler.js:

https://intercoolerjs.org

released in 2013, and that version depended on jQuery

You asked for it:

https://htmx.org

https://hyperscript.org

I hated angular when it first came out and couldn't believe what insanity people were willing to come up with, so long as it came from google. (e.g. GWT) I created https://intercoolerjs.org out of frustration with that, and the lack of progress in HTML/hypermedia in general, so I could build a web application I was working on (https://leaddyno.com, since sold).

When covid hit I took a look back at intercooler and decided that it was really two things: HTML++ and a scripting language, so I split it up into htmx, focused just on the hypermedia angle, and hyperscript, the scripting language I wanted for the web (derived from HyperTalk, and old scripting language from HyperCard on the mac).

I know use them both professionally (email me if you want to use them too.)

I created intercooler.js in 2013 so I could do AJAX in HTML:

https://intercoolerjs.org

Last year I removed the jquery dependency and cleaned it up based on a lot of lessons that I learned, renaming it to hmtx:

https://htmx.org

Same idea: extends/complete HTML as a hypertext so you can build more advanced UI within the original hypermedia web model, and cleaner implementation.

Part of that cleanup involved me pulling out some functionality around events and a proto-scripting language (ic-action), and I enjoy programming languages, so I created a front end scripting language to fill that need:

https://hyperscript.org

It's based on HyperTalk and has a lot of domain specific features for lightweight front end scripting, kind of a jQuery or AlpineJS alternative.

This is my experience, and your mileage may vary:

Multiple times in my coding career I have felt stalled and/or like I was regressing.

Early on, I worked on a programming language, gosu (https://gosu-lang.github.io/) which ended up not really going anywhere. Once the work on it was done, I returned to more mundane web programming for a while. A long while after that, and unexpectedly, I turned a jQuery function I was noodling on into intercooler.js (https://intercoolerjs.org/). After a year of that I returned to mundane web programming for quite a while. Unexpectedly, a year ago, the country shut down. I was at home and decided to see if I could remove the jQuery dependency in intercooler.js, and so created htmx (https://htmx.org/). When creating htmx and removing some attribute/functionality, I realized that a small programming language would be the ideal replacement, so I created hyperscript: https://hyperscript.org/. I had not expected to work on a programming language again, but now I am.

So my career has been some very exciting technical projects punctuating long stretches of pretty basic web development, where the most exciting thing is me wondering if I can figure out what the deuce is wrong with my CSS. My takeaway here, at least in my career, is that patience is a virtue, and the interesting stuff tends to come up at irregular intervals and in unexpected moments and ways.

htmx is the successor to intercooler.js. It swaps parts of the page, not the whole page like Turbolinks. htmx allows you to access AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext