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Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Web components to me represent the architecture I’d like to have. I think a good arch could be:

1. Build a rails/django type site, make everything work vanilla http+html etc.

2. Create standalone web components for the places you need some more interactivity, like type-ahead search box, “click to add” type thing, or a datatable

So most of your performance stuff could be handled/improved on the server, focus on aggressive caching etc. and most of the complexity would be on the server with small stand-alone parts on the client (ideally without a lot of interconnection, i.e. without a big client side state manager). This would not allow full-spa but I am not convinced SPA is the answer in many/most of the cases it’s used.

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Have you heard about Phoenix LiveView? Sounds like what you want.

It's a Rails-like framework written in Elixir (piggyback-ing off 30 years of BEAM), and LiveView changes the game by allowing you to build rich front-end application from your backend.

The way it works is that it serves you static HTML on initial load (yay SEO), and then it establishes a websocket connection to the server (very efficient thanks for BEAM), and every subsequent user interaction sends a event_name which you handle on the backend, and the backend respond with only the changed data (Phoenix can intelligently track your changes so it only sends what has actually changed), and then morphdom on the browser side patches things onto front-end.

You get the full power of interactivity but you barely have to touch any front end at all (and if you really do, it plays super well with AlpineJS, so you still get that escape hatch).

All in all, LiveView is amazing (and the surrounding technology), I just wish more people know about it!

While not nearly as efficient, Turbolinks (and Stimulus for interactivity) is pretty popular.

Another one worth a mention is StimulusReflex https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Real-time stimulus + rails.

Agreed, Elixir LiveView is a lot like what @sequoia describes. I use LiveView to handle creating the more complex logic, data handling (and caching) on the server. For UI layout you can get surprisingly far with mostly CSS nowadays with small events back to the server just changing a CSS class here and there. Oddly despite the server round trip, the responsiveness is great.

Here’s a demo I built for a small wrapper around Bulgaria CSS. Running on a tiny VPS: http://lacritch.xyz/

Now Elixir/BEAM is an excellent platform for this as the average and 99.9th percentile response times are really consistent. So your UI interactions don’t usually take 70ms with every Xth one taking 400 ms, which would be really annoying.

Right? I use LiveView with Tailwind, and for those little extra interactions, Alpine works amazingly well. Such a dream stack! Alpine was created by Caleb for LiveWire (inspired by LiveView), which is why it works so well too :)

Alternatives exist in:

Ruby https://docs.stimulusreflex.com/

Python https://github.com/jonathan-s/django-sockpuppet

PHP https://laravel-livewire.com/

This is exactly how I work - albeit on my own projects - vanilla html/css Go and Postgres for all server side operations with a few modular web components here and there for the interactivity you mentioned. No frameworks, build tools or config files ...

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