Pagy VS turbo

Now, let's dive into the pagination part of this post: setting up Pagy for handling pagination in our Rails application. If you haven't included the Pagy gem in your project, you'll need to add it manually. Here's how you can do it:

Several gems are available for pagination in Rails, but the Pagy gem is one of the most popular and efficient. It is a fast and lightweight library that provides a simple and flexible API. In this article, we’ll explore how to use it to implement pagination in Rails.

> Am I understanding correctly that there’s a significant difference in performance between using a ViewComponent + a partial vs. a ViewComponent which renders html via a tag - from inside the component?

I don't think there will be much difference at all in everyday use, but some libraries that value performance don't avoid templates for that reason, Pagy for example.

https://github.com/ddnexus/pagy

Personally I omit them in my projects whenever we want to customise attributes, I hate seeing stuff like this in templates:

    
Some header

The next step was about backporting the templates, adding Pagy gem for handling pagination and creating the controller. I was then able to show the listings with the models, but the filtering was not working.

On the backend, we'll need a few tools. Apart from the classics (ActiveRecord scopes and the pg_search gem), you’ll see how the (yet officially unreleased but production-tested) all_futures gem, built by SR authors, will act as an ideal ephemeral object to temporarily store our filter params and host our search logic. Finally, we’ll use pagy for pagination duties.

Pagination

In our application, we will use Pagy to implement pagination. Let’s install Pagy now, following along with the Pagy quick start guide.

For pagination I tend not to use gems like pagy or kaminari, instead implement this functionality just using limit and offset.

Kaminari hooks onto ActiveRecord associations and makes it super easy to page them. Pagy is another option that seems to have a solid API but I haven't tried it yet.

But how is this implemented? Well, if you use pagination in your index methods with gems like pagy, kaminari or will_paginate you will find that the same idea is happening here, they are using the power of SQL's LIMIT and OFFSET to fetch only a portion of the data each time. So in the 1 million users example, find_each will perform 1000 thousand queries with a limit of 1000 while changing the offset properly so we don't miss any record.

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/