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html-over-the-wire
HTML over the wire: List of frameworks which receive HTML snippets from the server.
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view_component
A framework for building reusable, testable & encapsulated view components in Ruby on Rails.
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InfluxDB
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turbo
The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript (by hotwired)
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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At the heart of Turbo is "HTML over the wire" (for which HOTWire is an acronym), which means the server sending HTML fragments for partial page updates, which (here's the big win) eliminates the need for client-side state management. There are lots of tools taking this approach now.
ViewComponent provides a home for this view-related logic. This post on the Code with Jason blog explains it best. In short, ViewComponent fills a big gap in MVC architecture.
On to the frontend! Turbo is part of Hotwire, which now ships with Rails. Turbo makes it really easy to give server-rendered pages a snappy SPA feel, where parts of the page are updated instantly instead of a full page reload.
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.
Besides Turbo, the other part of Hotwire is Stimulus, which typically is used for adding client-side reactivity in situations where you want to sprinkle in some JS. After all, you wouldn't want every user interaction to involve a round trip to the server. So why am I including only Turbo here and not Stimulus?
There's not much to say about Rails: it's boring tech, and therefore a good choice for most web apps.
For anything but a large app, Roda is well worth considering. It's not the easiest for beginners, due to its philosophy of being bare-bones by default but highly extendable. But it's gradually becoming integrated into Bridgetown, whose batteries-included approach is making Roda much more accessible.
Unpoly and HTMX are two of the most intriguing alternatives to Turbo because they are more framework-agnostic and have a flexible, concise syntax. Turbo, on the other hand, seems easier to get started with if you're in Rubyland.
Turbo + web components can take you a long way in making your Rails app feel modern, but there are other tools in this space that can complement them. I've already mentioned Stimulus, but there's also StimulusReflex which is like Stimulus but on the server, and CableReady which is somewhat like Turbo Streams but more flexible. Be sure to give these a try if your app is highly interactive, or if you just want to expand your horizons beyond Hotwire.