Huh? Something like Rails lets you iterate on server-side stuff extremely quickly. There is a lot of functionality you can implement that doesn't need JS at all
As for web app vs web page--it's a very blurry line, and it's rare that I end up building something where the entire site could be considered a web app. Usually only some small pieces of it demand enough interactivity to bother with the complexities of using a UI framework, and for that I wrap a small React or a Svelte app in a div and throw it on a page within the larger site.
you would think so, but there are an awful lot of people don't seemed to be stopped by that
* composable templates
* reusable JS snippets
* hot reloading in your browser
And additionally, given that the topic is "building web applications", I can't really understand how you think you can build interactivity without JS. Are you proposing form-based updates or is your understanding of "application" different than GP and mine?
We recently added this "feature" to our react-on-rails codebase, and the only thing I can ask is... why?
Hot reloading on Unreal Engine is a hot mess with all sorts of little caveats to think about. Meanwhile I can hit F5 and as long as my browser is configured right I can guarantee there's no old cruft to deal with. Why in the world would I want to add that kind of uncertainty in my work codebase??
The analogy I like to make is this: imagine a painter had to wait 3 seconds for every stroke they made to show up. Would they be as good? Would they try out as many variations? Discover new paths they could go because they had the time to “test that weird idea real quick a few times”?
Hot reloading works especially well on React (and not I assume on game engines) because React, with hooks, used algebraic effects, which means all side effects are properly understood by the system and are undoable. So it’s not as hacky at all as you’d imagine.
I never understood the hate for HMR as a concept. Perhaps your implementation wasn’t great, but as a general concept it’s literally a game changer.
The same people who cast shade on it seem to always embrace incremental compilation (like in Rust) for some reason, too.
But I also think this lessens the requirement for a solid mind's eye and ability to visualize changes before you make them. Having come from desktop development (with "live" gui development kits like VB) into webdev I guess I got used to code-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-hit-reload pattern.
As long as it doesn't get in my way, I'm cool with it.
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#us...
There's no standard way for handling hot reloading, but there's a bunch of recipes on stackoverflow.