turbo-ios VS turbo

If you're a SwiftUI developer, I've had an issue open at https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/issues/8 to get Turbo SwiftUI off the ground.

I've talked to a few folks about it and have heard responses ranging from "it's a bad idea/can't be done" (mainly because of SwiftUI bugs) to "why would you want to do that?". I think it would be amazing to have a declarative of building out a Hotwire Rails application inside of iOS. Bonus if the Turbo SwiftUI component could run on macOS.

For the mobile side, start with each platform's respective Turbo package: https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios and https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-android. Each has a demo app you can run in XCode/Android studio. To get a basic app building, follow each one's "Getting Started" guide. It's actually pretty easy to get a basic native app building, the hard part comes in integrating native components and services, as well as release management.

turbo-ios and turbo-android are the shell/wrapper apps handling native navigation, written for native iOS and Android. They are provided for you, and works out-of-the-box, but you risk having to fiddle with iOS and Android development for maintenance/debugging later on.

Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Postgres, Redis

Does anyone have experience with https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios or https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-android ?

1. Turbo Native

I use Turbo Native on iOS to do exactly this.

You render your mobile web view like normal, wire up a JavaScript handler (formerly known as Turbolinks), and push native screens on iOS. It works really well for CRUD and "boring" SAAS apps with little interaction outside of forms. And when you need higher fidelity dropping down to SwiftUI or UIKit is straightforward.

https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios

To make things even simpler, I built Jumpstart iOS, which takes care of all of the Swift boilerplate. Navigation, authentication, and push notifications all work out of the box after adding a few endpoints to your server.

https://jumpstartrails.com/ios

Adding to the already mentioned solutions, another alternative may be to develop your app with Phoenix and [Hotwire](https://hotwired.dev/), using Turbo on the backend and [Turbo-ios](https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios) for your app.

turbo-ios and turbo-android are small wrappers around your web views. You write native Swift and Kotlin wrappers but the frameworks display your web content. They also handle navigation and data transmission between the views and native code.

I’d like to see this integrate more tightly with Rails Turbo framework. Ideally it would understand Visitables and plug into SwiftUI. I took a swing at that at https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-ios/issues/8 but have struggled to get it working … that and Strada hasn’t come out yet, which I assume is the equiv of the native plugins within Portals.

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/