One of the wonderful things about working in Rails in 2021 is that we are spoiled for options when it comes to building modern, reactive applications. When we need to build highly interactive user experiences, we don’t need to reach for JavaScript frameworks like Vue or React — the Rails ecosystem has all the tools we need to deliver exceptionally fast, efficient, and easy-to-maintain front ends.
Yesterday, I published an article demonstrating a simple implementation of a sortable table with StimulusReflex. Today, we’re going to build the same experience with Turbo Frames instead.
Why build the same thing with two different tools? Because we have great options to choose from in Rails-land, and understanding each option is a great place to start when considering which tool is right for you and your team.
Like yesterday, our application is going to allow users to view a table of players. They’ll be able to click on each header cell to sort the table in ascending and descending order.
Sorting will happen very quickly, without a full-page turn, and we won’t be writing any custom JavaScript or doing anything outside of writing ordinary Ruby code and ERB templates.
When we’re finished, the application will work like this:
You can demo the application for yourself on Heroku (the free dyno might need a moment to wake up when you visit it) or view the complete source on Github.
This article assumes that you are comfortable building applications with Ruby on Rails and may be difficult to follow if you have never worked with Rails before. Previous experience with Turbo Frames is not required.
Today we’re going to use Ruby on Rails and StimulusReflex to build a table that sorts itself each time a user clicks on a header column.
Sorting will occur without a page turn, in less than 100ms, won’t require any custom JavaScript, and we’ll build the whole thing with regular old ERB templates and a little bit of Ruby.
The end result will be very fast, efficient, simple to reason about, and easy to extend as new functionality is required.
It’ll be pretty fancy.
When we’re finished, it will work like this:
You can view the finished product on Heroku, or find the full source on Github.
This article will be most useful to folks who are familiar with Ruby on Rails, but you will not need any previous experience with Stimulus or StimulusReflex to follow along. If you’ve never worked with Rails before, some concepts here may be a little tough to follow.
The Rails ecosystem continues to thrive, and Rails developers have all the tools they need to build modern, reactive, scalable web applications quickly and efficiently. If you care about delivering exceptional user experiences, your options in Rails-land have never been better.
Today we’re going to dive into this ecosystem to use two cutting edge Rails projects to allow users to submit forms that are rendered inside of a modal.
The form will open in a modal with content populated dynamically by the server, the server will process the form submission, and the DOM will updated without a full-page turn.
To accomplish this, we’ll use Stimulus for the front-end interactivity, CableReady’s brand new CableCar feature to send content back from the server, and Mrujs to enable AJAX requests and to automatically process CableCar’s operations.
It’ll be pretty fancy.
When we’re finished, our application will look like this:
This article includes a fair amount of JavaScript and assumes a solid understanding of the basics of Ruby on Rails.
If you’ve never used Rails before, this article might move a little too quickly for you. While comfort with Rails and JavaScript are needed, you don’t need to have any prior experience with CableReady or Stimulus.
As usual, you can find the complete source code for this article on Github.
