The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby, but I respect the fact that the Javascript-client-side-heavy/"single-page" part of the app is where the magic is for at least a few years now- really several years.
Not really sure why you say that whilst TL3 tries to solve exactly that issue in a simpler, classical way [0]
I love the idea of being able to use the usual Rails helpers combined with JS in a React-kind of way and at first sight that's what TL3 could manage to do.
[0] by that I'm referring to the clean HTML that still looks semantic and has all the normal separation of views and styles whereas in React et al if one's inspects the code is just looks horrid.
Regarding SPAs the isomorphic approach seems really contrived at this point and for most web apps TL3 seems like an elegant solution whilst keeping the full power of Rails intact.
Sure there are cases with heavy UI apps that require components et al but for my use cases TL3 + Rails5 looks like a breath of fresh air, maybe a middle step to full SPA.
[0] by that I'm referring to the clean HTML that still looks semantic and has all the normal separation of views and styles whereas in React et al if one's inspects the code is just looks horrid.
Even though I'm a JS-first dev but I second that. ( HTML & CSS in JS ) is a bad idea and not considered to be progress from the messy yet working templating engines (JS in HTML).
Proponents love to argue that integrating HTML & CSS into JS makes it easier for testing since JS is amenable to thorough testing as opposed to HTML & CSS.
While this is partially true and template files are not straightforward to test esp when you throw app logic into the mix but it still manageable if you kept to a minimum to the view part only and don't go overboard with it.
Also and this is very important, It's a given that HTML & CSS are forgiving compared to JS when it comes to errors but that doesn't mean that it's unlikely for a developer to shoot himself in the foot or to introduce unwanted/unintended bugs in the app through them esp. CSS and these usually are harder to catch and fix.
Not really sure why you say that whilst TL3 tries to solve exactly that issue in a simpler, classical way [0]
I love the idea of being able to use the usual Rails helpers combined with JS in a React-kind of way and at first sight that's what TL3 could manage to do.
[0] by that I'm referring to the clean HTML that still looks semantic and has all the normal separation of views and styles whereas in React et al if one's inspects the code is just looks horrid.
Regarding SPAs the isomorphic approach seems really contrived at this point and for most web apps TL3 seems like an elegant solution whilst keeping the full power of Rails intact.
Sure there are cases with heavy UI apps that require components et al but for my use cases TL3 + Rails5 looks like a breath of fresh air, maybe a middle step to full SPA.