turbo-django VS hotwire-rails

Indicative of how marvelously stable Django is that none of these roadmap items have to do with the software.

I came back to the old workhorse for some experimentation recently and was delighted, delighted (!), I tell you, at how familiar, comfortable, and productive it was.

Started exploring a Turbolinks/Turboframes implementation (https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django) that Just Worked. Amusingly, mid-hack, the repo owner marked it as unmaintained.

But it works! Nothing needs doing! Another victim of the cult of constant improvement.

Yes Turbo is created by the team behind Ruby on Rails and it's an evolution of Turbolinks with bunch of other functionality added. But Turbo can be adapted to other languages and backend frameworks (and already has!). This Turbo thing is not Rails specific.

If you would like to try something different, there is this new thing called hotwired: https://github.com/hotwire-django/turbo-django Basically, it's about generating HTML on the backend and pushing it to the frontend. thru WebSockets. It's not production-ready yet (for Django at least) so it's more like a fun fact for now.

Applications generated with Rails 7 will get Turbo and Stimulus (from Hotwire) by default, instead of Turbolinks and UJS. Hotwire is a new approach that delivers fast updates to the DOM by sending HTML over the wire.

For Ajax-y stuff, I am really excited by the new crop of "HTML-as-a-Service" or "HTML-over-the-wire."

https://htmx.org/

https://hotwired.dev/

For all the turbo/stimulus/hotwire mix, you want to add a new feature just for the sake of adding it? or do you have a use case that fits the feature? if you have then you probably already have an implementation with a different technology (stimulus reflex? some custom websockets or ajax implementation? something with anycable?) and you have to check how to migrate from that technology to hotwire. If you just want to use the feature with no real need for it to practice then just pick any tutorial from the internet (like the intro in the official website https://hotwired.dev).

I was recently interested in similar topic. Here are 3 similar solutions I found:

* https://htmx.org/

* https://unpoly.com/

* https://hotwired.dev/

My personal preference is Unpoly (the idea of "layers" is awesome). But the best explanation of concept as a whole (HATEOAS, keeping app state on server using partial page updates, etc) is at HTMX homepage, and in these essays:

* https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas/

* https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/

At the end of 2020 the Basecamp team released a collection of Javascript libraries called Hotwire. Modern web stacks have popularized javascript-rendered front ends and JSON transmissions. Hotwire's primary motivation is to reduce the Javascript footprint and allow application front ends to be created in primarily HTML. It pairs very nicely with the Ruby on Rails ideology and is often demonstrated in that context. I aim to write a series on how Hotwire can be used in any application to simplify development and reduce the need for heavy Javascript downloads. Hotwire currently consists of two javascript libraries: Turbo and Stimulus. The first part of this series introduces Turbo.

I've been doing that a while until I just got sock of the JS spagetti and often duplicated code and went full on Angular CSR and never looked back. That being said, I've been seeing a lot recently about Laravel's Livewire and Symfony and Ruby on Rail's integration with Hotwire (stimulus+turbo).