Opal VS vite

It's been a long time dream for me since about 2013 when I started getting deep into Ruby and Rails, to be able to write Ruby code for the frontend instead of JavaScript. I was a lover and adopter of CoffeeScript (which had it's flaws and imperfections), but that mostly got killed by ES6. I wrote some PoCs with Opal[1] that felt pretty good to write, but the overhead was rough (this was many years ago so things might be different now) and I never really felt like I didn't have to know about or care about the underlying javascript. I tend to discard leaky abstractions as I feel they often add more complexity than they were meant to cover in the first place.

Has anybody used this or Opal or anything else? What is the state of "write your frontend in Ruby" nowadays?

[1]: https://github.com/opal/opal

Every time I see a respectable project use a Code of Conduct I remind myself that, unfortunately, Caroline Ada won[1]

[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

But we shouldn't overstate the difference: the JS and Ruby object models are actually similar in how dynamic both of them are. This makes Ruby-to-JS compilers like Opal easier to implement, according to an Opal maintainer.

This is an interview with the author of Opal, here's the project:

https://github.com/opal/opal

Not the OP, but from what I remember they would seek out every possible opportunity in every single possible open source community they could find and propose the CoC that they wrote. 0 contributions to the projects, with the exception of demanding that people implement incredibly verbose CoC's in their projects under the guise of "protecting the minorities contributing to the projects".

Most infamous instance is probably this one, in the Opal repo: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

As well as this thread in the Ruby issue tracker that devolves into pure chaos with Ada refusing to actually participate in any of the valid points others bring up: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004

And I'm sure there's many other instances if you look around a bit.

My experience with ruby for front end web dev is via https://opalrb.com/

Here's an example of the creator of the most adopted CoC (the Contributor Covenant) trying to get an open source contributor removed from a project due to his political opinions expressed on Twitter which she didn't like and found offensive.

So ruby has a JS transpiler - opal - https://opalrb.com/

I tried using it a little bit but the reality is if you need JS to make your app more interactable it's really worth it to just learn some JS. As soon as you need something complex the extra layer of abstraction just gets in the way and becomes more of a headache, and if you don't need anything complex then you don't need JS in the first place.

I stumbled upon this thing from years ago. I did some more digging to see what other communities thought about it. Turns out that a lot of people are really against Coraline's side.

Given our team's collective proficiency within the React ecosystem, we decided to leverage this expertise for our project. Initially, we contemplated utilizing Next.js; however, due to the limited practical experience with this technology among key engineers and the pressing timeline to develop the first prototype, we opted for a Single Page Application(SPA) approach. For bundling, we selected Vite, primarily due to its super fast build times, simplicity of configuration, and potential for a nearly seamless transition to server-side rendering.

We are continuing to add new project templates for various types of projects, and we've recently created one for the infamous combination of React with Vite tooling.

Vite focuses on providing an extremely fast development server and workflow speed in web development. It uses its own ES module imports during development, speeding up the startup time.

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc' import path from 'path' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 3000 }, css: { devSourcemap: true }, resolve: { alias: { '~': path.resolve(__dirname, './src') } } })

I am currently utilizing Vite:

Homepage: https://vitejs.dev/

Without any adding any dependencies you can connect react props to raw css at runtime with nothing but css variables (aka "custom properties"). If you add CSS modules on top you don't have to worry about affecting the global scope so components created in this way can be truly modular and transferrable. I use this with vite.

Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/

it says in their docs that they recommend Vite https://vitejs.dev/

it goes like this.

1. you create a repo folder, you cd into it.

2. you create a client template using vite which can be plain typescript, or uses frameworks such as react or vue, at https://vitejs.dev/guide/

3. you cd in that client directory, you npm install, then you npm run dev, it should show you that it works at localhost:5173

4. you follow the instructions on your url, you do npm install @web3modal/wagmi @wagmi/core @wagmi/connectors viem

5. you follow the further instructions.

> It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what?

you install the wagmi modules, then you import them in your js code, those code can run upon being loaded or upon user actions such as button clicks

> Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

no need for those. browserify is old school way of transpiling commonjs modules into browser-compatible modules. webpack is similar. vite replaces both webpack and browserify. vite also uses esbuild and swc under the hood which replaces babel.

> I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

pretty much similar actually. except on client-side, you have src and dist folders. when you run "npm run build" vite will compile the src dir into dist dir. the outputs are the static files that you can serve with any http server such as npx serve, or caddy, or anything really.

> What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

vite supports both ecmascript modules and commonjs modules. but these days you'll just want to stick with ecmascript which makes your code consistently use import and export syntax, and you get the extra benefit of it working well with your vscode intellisense.

> In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

if people want plain js there is unpkg.com and esm.sh way, but the vite route is the best for you as it's recommended and tested by the providers of your modules.

> And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

I recommend typescript, as it gives you better type-safety and better intellisense, but it really depends. If you're new to it, it can slow you down at first. But as your project grows you'll eventually see the value of it. In vite there are options to scaffold your project in pure js or ts.