tetra VS Opal

Then there are stack-specific libraries: StimulusReflex for Rails, Phoenix LiveView, Laravel Livewire, Unicorn and Tetra for Django, Blazor for .NET, … and the list goes on.

Unicorn is awesome, and I think most would agree that it's the Django communities answer to Livewire/Liveview/etc. Adam has built a brilliant project and the time he must dedicate to it is amazing!

Last year I had a month free and I had a go at building something for Django in this area, with a bunch of interesting ideas - built on Alpine.js, resumable server side component state, inline component templates. But sadly time is limited and I just can't spend the time needed to push it further. One day I may be able to pivot back to it: https://www.tetraframework.com/

There's a brilliant project called Django Unicorn that aims to be the equivalent of Laravel Livewire for Django. You should take a look.

https://www.django-unicorn.com/

That and HTMX + Alpine.js are a strong combination.

(I also had a bash at building a similar tool for Django called Tetra but unfortunately haven't had the time needed to commit to it: https://www.tetraframework.com)

Most full-stack applications separate frontend and backend code into distinct files; most web frameworks are built based on this structure. As the number of files and lines of code increases, it may increase the complexity of your codebase, thereby making it even more difficult to debug. The complexity caused by these separate files was minimized through the introduction of a framework called Tetra.

One of my apps built on the Django+HTMX stack got traction and no matter how much I loved using HTMX, I found it’s not feasible to keep a clean codebase (facilitating new developers on the team as well) with this stack.

[Tetra](https://www.tetraframework.com/) might be an alternative if you’re hell-bent on not using React.

But, if you want to ship quick, have a maintainable codebase in a technology a lot of devs are familiar with and have the power to instantly have an app for mobile (and buy yourself some time to build one in React Native; code is going to be similar to React.js), I’d recommend using React.

You can use Capacitor.js for instantly shipping a mobile app with your codebase that “just works”. Use Capgo for affordable codepush and you’re set!

But then again, HTMX all the way if you’re not building an app cause not everything is an “app”. At the same time, if you’re building an app with a framework unlike Phoenix, I don’t see why would not go ahead and use a decent JS framework. It seems to be getting a lot of hate and I don’t understand if it’s because of the inability to learn React or what.

tetra

Recently I found a web framework the sits on top of Django and is specifically designed to work with Alpine.js (tetraframework.com). What makes it stand out is that HTMX or Hotwire isn't needed, as Tetra takes care of it. (discussion on ycombinator)

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.