“Once out of the realm of little programs, such as the ones you wrote in school, the economics of software take on a strange reversal in which the cheapest programs to own are the ones that are the most expensive to write, and the most expensive programs are the cheapest to write.” – Alan Cooper […]
Stimulus.js Tutorial: Interactive Deletes with Rails UJS
Interactive websites have that feeling of immediacy. Clicked links respond in milliseconds, and there is never a need to wait… Waiting for a remote record to delete, and then the whole page refresh afterwards can feel like an eternity in web’s modernity. But, A little Stimulus works well with Rails’ Unobtrusive Javascript to make items […]
Stimulus + ActionCable + ActiveJob: Loading Asynchronous API Data
Interactivity. Every web app needs it. And Rails comes with a number of tools, which, together, generate that feeling of a fast, responsive app, with mostly server rendered HTML and a little Javascript sprinkled on top. ActiveJob fetches data from a remote JSON api in the background. ActionCable routes data from the background job out […]
Leaving Breadcrumbs in your Progressive Web App with Stimulus.js
One of the features of a Progressive Web App is the lack of browser chrome on a mobile device. iOS and Android hide little things like the address bar and the browser history buttons. It’s up to the PWA itself to provide the navigation to previous pages. Breadcrumbs are one technique of displaying previously visited […]
Loading and Templating JSON Responses in Stimulus.js
Just because Stimulus.js is designed to work with HTML over the wire doesn’t mean it can’t use JSON APIs when the need arises. In fact, it can perform just like Vue.js in pulling JSON from an API and placing the results on your page. Here is a tutorial that loads commit messages from Github, and renders them […]
Subscribing to many channels in ActionCable
There are many times when logically it makes sense for a page to receive updates about many different items. Sometimes those items are similar, so many ActionCable channels can each listen for one item, or a single channel listen for many different items. Here is an example of using one ActionCable channel to subscribe to […]
Easy PWAs the Rails way
Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs, have a home in Rails. There are a few pieces to add to any app to make it a PWA. With a little configuration, an app will be installable in a browser, accessible offline, and in line with any other front end framework. PWAs? Progressive Web Apps are a type […]
Grabbing ActionCable with Stimulus.js
Use Stimulus.js to manage ActionCable connections in your interactive web app.
Build a Markdown Editor in Stimulus.js like in Vue.js
I’ve been looking into different Javascript frontends to see if they made my development life easier. I’ve been looking specifically to see if they improve on some Stimulus sprinkles and server rendered HTML. One interesting example was converting a text area from markdown to html. It uses marked to perform the conversion, and it uses […]
Where do I store my state in Stimulus.js?
Stimulus.js allows for a myriad of ways to store state about our webapp. One thing to always keep in mind is that Stimulus.js wants to enhance existing HTML instead of control all of the page’s DOM, so we will need to think of ways that leverage server generated HTML to manage our state and progressively […]