stimulus-use VS Twig

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.

Miscommunication in our projects is costly. A single misunderstood User Story can result in 3 days of wasted development time. Additionally, when developers do not use the same programming language, it may be necessary to construct APIs to facilitate communication, which can also be expensive. It is important to consider why front-end developers may be hesitant to work with Twig and how this can lead to a disconnect between front-end and back-end development.

The first step before generating the PDF is writing the HTML. To generate the HTML string, we will use the Twig template engine, which is the default one in Symfony. It comes with tons of features such as inheritance, blocks, filters, functions, and more.

In the phase of outputting data, you can use template engines like Twig or Blade or htmlspecialchars function.

Joomla dips into and out of php to get vars/logic into the frontend, which is fine, but it's nowhere near as tidy as a full-fledged templating engine like blade or twig which many other php CMSs offer out of the box.

FTLOG, use a template engine. Do NOT use PHP itself as a template engine (ironic given its origins). The best are probably Twig (https://twig.symfony.com/) (used by Symfony and a few others) and Latte (https://latte.nette.org/) (less widely used, but its syntax is *way* more learnable as it's more like PHP itself).

It took me a while to find a PHP project that was simple enough for me to set up on a single Docker image, but after some trial and error I found the Twig project.

Symfony uses Twig, a fast, secure, and flexible templating engine. Twig allows the developer to define custom tags and filters and create Domain-Specific Languages (DSL).