This whole saga feels like one of those things where "I've heard this story before, I think I'll sit this one out and hope it's not too long" situations.
We all prioritize what tech we're going to spend our time on, but I think there's something qualitatively different between, "that could be interesting but I don't care", "That'll never work!", and, "I understand this enough to know it does not meet my criteria for job satisfaction, I'm out. Call me when the Trough of Disillusionment hits."
So we come back around to Rails, 15 years on from its launch…
I think turbolinks hit too close to the AngularJS launch, and got swamped. People who were trying to make everything happen with jQuery skipped straight to Angular. Now Elixir is trying to resurrect turbolinks-plus in Phoenix.
frankly elixir allows you do far more than that. I am going to be working on enabling phoenix to serve its liveview over WebRTC (I think it will be relatively easy); it is transport agnostic
I know people loved turbolinks, but the very thought of it gives me nightmares. That kind of tight coupling between server side and client is everything the modern JS ecosystem evolved to get away from. I can see it being useful in a single developer full stack environment to get something up and running. But any kind of long term complicated application development in that paradigm just sounds painful.
> I know people loved turbolinks, but the very thought of it gives me nightmares.
Is it really that bad?
With Turbolinks 5 (and its successor Hotwire Turbo Drive) you can do nothing except add 1 line of JS to your application and reap massive wins in terms of page transition speeds. And this all works without changing 1 line of code on the back-end and it works with all tech stacks.
IMO it's the biggest bang for your buck that you can do to make a website feel good with the least amount of effort.
And now with Turbo Drive you can do the same with form submissions without needing any back-end code and it also works with every tech stack with no special libraries or work to be done server side.
Then Turbo Frames builds upon that to partially update a segment of your page and Turbo Streams introduces websockets for when you want to broadcast stuff or do real-time updates.
It's a great system. Use HTTP for everything except for when websockets makes sense.
This whole saga feels like one of those things where "I've heard this story before, I think I'll sit this one out and hope it's not too long" situations.
We all prioritize what tech we're going to spend our time on, but I think there's something qualitatively different between, "that could be interesting but I don't care", "That'll never work!", and, "I understand this enough to know it does not meet my criteria for job satisfaction, I'm out. Call me when the Trough of Disillusionment hits."
I think turbolinks hit too close to the AngularJS launch, and got swamped. People who were trying to make everything happen with jQuery skipped straight to Angular. Now Elixir is trying to resurrect turbolinks-plus in Phoenix.