🔗 Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails
Wednesday, 25 July, 2018 — development links
I remember thinking that Rails was focusing on the wrong target when DHH announced Turbolinks in 2012. My conviction back then was that offering an instant response time to user interactions was key to excellent UX. Because of network latency, such interactivity is only possible if you minimize your dependency on it and, instead, manage a lot of state on the client.
I thought this was necessary for the kinds of apps I was working on. And with that in mind, I tried many approaches and frameworks for implementing the same pattern: Single-page applications (SPA). I believed that the SPA wagon was the future™. A few years of experience later, I am not sure what the future is, but I really want to have an alternative.
This piece really spoke to me. There’s a wide world of possibility with JavaScript, front-end frameworks and Single Page Apps these days. JavaScript’s maturing and growth over the past few years are a fantastic story. What I’m less enthusiastic about is the complexity that seems to pervade front-end development work.
I think a lot of it is getting used to having these rich tools available to solve problems. I also think, in many cases, we’re over-applying these tools when simpler solutions would fit many problems better than the full framework Single Page App approach.