turbo-ios VS htmx

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.

When I work with HTMX I need isolated component that can be reusable a form. So I create a PHP Function that generate the Input Datalist.

I was inspired by htmz (which was in turn inspired by htmx) and how the author got pretty close to a basic htmx-like experience just using an iframe. I wanted to push it a little further so whipped this demo together. My submission demonstrates progressive enhancement for the form - with js enabled the request targets an iframe that is inserted into the dom, meaning the page doesn't actually navigate (similar to event.preventDefault()). The iframe receives the html response from the request and on load triggers a function to swap out it's contents into the main page.

As described on htmx.org: "htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext"

Apart from the source code itself, the repo's README also gives a bit more details about the various packages I used.

1. htmx: https://htmx.org/

Also, there’s some response header juggling you have to do when submitting forms that have a validation step before redirecting: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/issues/369

I’ve tried to iron out any footguns or server requirements I’ve bumped into while using HTMX & Hotwire in my projects.

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

I've been digging into HTMX lately (using Python web frameworks) and find the concepts and approach to be interesting and promising. The idea of hypermedia driven systems over the current practice of JavaScript based frameworks (I never really got into React, played with Vue, and enjoy Svelte/SvelteKit) and the ability to chose your language/framework for the backend while primarily leveraging HTML/CSS on the frontend just seems refreshing.

Apparently it changed from 2-clause BSD: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/commit/e16f1865a494b6...

(The zero clause license drops the requirements for preserving the copyright notice when distributing)

It would be a sin not to start with something that prides itself on being the front-end library of peace. HTMX skyrocketed in popularity in 2023, gaining most of its GitHub stars during the past year. HTMX is not your average JS framework. If you work in HTMX, you will spend most of your time in the world of hypermedia, looking at web development from a completely different pair of eyes as compared to our usual JS-heavy outlook on modern web development. HTMX leverages the power of the concept of HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State), enabling developers to access browser features directly from HTML, instead of using Javascript.