stimulus_reflex VS importmap-rails

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.

Morphing and the concept to do refreshes after broadcast are hardly new. Stimulus Reflex has employed morphing to update the page for years, and CableReady::Updatable, which allows listening to model requests for refreshes, has also been around for a while. But I am excited to see these concepts being adopted in Turbo and becoming more mainstream.

Stimulus Reflex (Ruby), which predates Hotwire, also deserves a mention, though most of its momentum seemed to stall when Hotwire was announced.

https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Hi there, not crazy experienced on the topic but after some research i made for personal reasons i found https://mayu.live/ whick looks interesting (and as mentioned already https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/, seems to be close to Liveview)

StimulusReflex Docs pretty easy to use and release 3.5.0 is coming soon.

However, the timing may be a little off. In some ways, it feels like the "Express" way of developing for the backend is dying. We are seeing tools that blur the line between backend and frontend, trying to unify how we develop web applications. Tools like Phoenix LiveView, StimulusReflex, Laravel Livewire, Remix, Next.js, and many others are being developed.

You can also learn Rails and StimulusReflex

Reading the article and the source code, I learned a ton of stuff, as always. In his implementation, Louis is using StimulusReflex (built on top of Stimulus) to achieve this. I was curious about several points:

Now that we know that our backend is working as it should, let’s wire up our stuff. I’m gonna skip on Stimulus Reflex setup and configuration and dive right in. You can easily follow the official setup or, if you use import-maps, follow @julianrubisch’s article on the topic. I also know that leastbad has been working on an automatic installer that detects your configuration and sets everything up for you if you care to try it before the next version of SR gets released.

It is implemented as a thor task in lib/importmap/cmmands.rb

With importmaps (https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails) and Hotwire (https://hotwired.dev/), you write plain js and serve it.

Also packages are served via CDN. There is no tree shaking. Rails got rid of the whole bundling step.

Importmap audit - “checks the NPM registry for known security issues”

It worked, but JS changes were not coming through. Digging into the Importmap docs (see 'sweeping the cache', it monitors changes according to the setting config.importmap.cache_sweepers. So, by adding the locations where I have my JS files, I also got JS changes passed through.

You can't use TypeScript, or anything that requires pre-compile, with importmap. answered issue

Let's begin by installing the necessary dependencies. The first gem generates the importmap object, manages caching, and helps with library installations, among other things. I recommend reading the entire readme to become familiar with its capabilities. The second gem will be discussed later, it is used to compile JSX files. Gemfile

Yeah, those were brand new right around the time I started this project a few years ago with Rails 7 (or was it 6.1?). I actually ended up removing them in favor of importmap-rails since I wanted as simple of a frontend as possible and I wasn't sure of relying on what was, at the time, a brand new way of doing frontend work. Things change so quickly in JS-land that I'm always hesitant to make something a dependency unless it has a strong track record of being continuously maintained.

source "https://rubygems.org" git_source(:github) { |repo| "https://github.com/#{repo}.git" } ruby "3.1.0" # Bundle edge Rails instead: gem "rails", github: "rails/rails", branch: "main" gem "rails", "~> 7.0.4", ">= 7.0.4.2" # The original asset pipeline for Rails [https://github.com/rails/sprockets-rails] gem "sprockets-rails" # Use sqlite3 as the database for Active Record gem "sqlite3", "~> 1.4" # Use the Puma web server [https://github.com/puma/puma] gem "puma", "~> 5.0" # Use JavaScript with ESM import maps [https://github.com/rails/importmap-rails] gem "importmap-rails" # Hotwire's SPA-like page accelerator [https://turbo.hotwired.dev] gem "turbo-rails" # Hotwire's modest JavaScript framework [https://stimulus.hotwired.dev] gem "stimulus-rails" # Build JSON APIs with ease [https://github.com/rails/jbuilder] gem "jbuilder" gem "mongoid" gem "mongoid-grid_fs" gem 'bootstrap', '~> 5.2.2' #sourced from https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-rubygem gem 'rack-cors' # Windows does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem gem "tzinfo-data", platforms: %i[ mingw mswin x64_mingw jruby ] # Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb gem "bootsnap", require: false

Also, installing StimulusReflex seems quite not easy for the moment: It seems there are some quirks along the way if you're using import-maps for managing javascript dependencies as I do. Embracing the Rails way at least prevents you from this sort of issue.