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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I got in so many arguments at work defending intercooler.js, eventually I caved and started using angular. I'm still regretting it.

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Same thing happened to me. I was really intrigued by intercooler when I first found it a couple years ago, but lacking experience in the front-end, I found myself cornered in a conversation about it with a React snob. Ultimately, I turned my attention elsewhere before I ever got a chance to sink my teeth into it.

Glad to see the project is going strong and getting a makeover. Especially in web development, the constant obsession with the Next Big Thing can be a real deterrent against some really cool ideas. Kutty won't make you a more desirable job candidate or force you to develop new and challenging mental models (afaiu); it'll never give rise to an ecosystem of plugins and extensions the way React has; and with Webpack integration in the latest release of Rails (where I'm coming from), frontend frameworks are being normalized as the default approach (or at least the final destination) of any web application these days.

But engineering is about trade-offs. There's a sizable chunk of projects out there whose requirements are modest enough to be met with HTML, AJAX, and a little glue to hold them together, and kutty seems to provide a really clean abstraction layer there.

Really looking forward to trying it out soon.

Who knows? If you get a lot of little projects working quickly because of kutty+backend, it might just make you a more attractive job candidate.

:) I think the jQuery thing was a big part of the problem, and also the idea that this is a competitor w/ angular, rather than a way to enhance HTML.

That's part of the rename, I want it to break out of that comparison.

One of you is definitely wrong, but it depends on the scope of the project. I would never build an SPA with intercooler and I would never build a static website with Angular/React.

I mean question is when do you need a spa. Take my beloved online pivot table. The web UI state is very similar to the server state. For instance, if the user adds a dimension to the pivot we need to instantly feed that back to the server. So it makes sense to use kutty here because server and web state are pretty much in sync and why would you not leverage server rendering for this.

Most apps I work on deal with large amounts of complex domain objects which are constantly being updated. A recent project ended up sending an average of 1 request per second. Doing all this server-side is a non-starter.

This is why I build SPAs: binding a button to a fetch request is the easy part. Managing lots of data in an dynamic/interactive UI is where I spend most of my time.

> I would never build a SPA with intercooler

and why is that? Though mithril.js fan here, but intercooler, kitty, unpoly - they look fantastic kit for SPA. These libraries just look like what Golang is against C++ and Java.

For the same reason I use React instead of jQuery. Kutty/Intercooler handle simple AJAX very cleanly but as the volume of data and scope of interactivity increases it becomes difficult to manage.

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