I am Ruby/Rails developer myself and StimulusReflex seem to be the equivalent but idk, is my feeling true?
My dream stack that I am using for my business is Phoenix, Live View and Stimulus.js with Tailwind.
I have built projects on Laravel, Django, RoR, React and a long tail of in house frameworks, and nothing feels as good as this stack for web apps. Ruby on Rails is quite underrated, but the BEAM is a spaceship that fits neatly in the list of unknown unknowns for 99% of software engineers: they do not know what the BEAM can do for them. Its process and mailbox model feels futuristic in its expressiveness and simplicity.
It's easier than you think to get used to Elixir's functional language model. For me it was super easy, while with stuff like Haskell or Prolog I felt like I had to rewrite my brain from scratch.
To end my proselitism, I am adamant that the first Live View demo by McCord and Valim will have the same staying power if not popularity as DHH's first demo of Ruby on Rails which spawned the modern MVC framework architecture of the past 15 years.
The Live View model is in my eyes the next generation of interactive web architecture, the true successor to MVC.
I am curious, why both LiveView and Stimulus.js? Why and how are you combining the two together?
Imagine a disappearing burger menu, or a tooltip widget, or a "click here to copy to clipboard" link. For those sprinkles of interactivity, you need JS and Stimulus is ideal for that use case.
I just have my Live View process render
<input type="text" data-controller="copy-on-click" value="..." />
Don't forget that JS was born for this goal: small snippets of interactive behaviour; it was never meant to be the entire system.
Either way, I'm shipping it to production immediately!
It seems to me a better investment of my time to learn a solution that's just as lightweight, but I can use everywhere (i.e. in other projects, or in static non-Liveview pages)
Client-side logic makes sense in a vacuum, but then your crappy React app is in fact a distributed system, with all the complexity that entails. The radical idea of Liveview and similar efforts is that it's better just to return to basics and keep the logic on the server. It would be lunacy to try and build a distributed system with Javascript, yet that's the direction the SPA world is/was taking us.
I do not like how it's trying to fit logic in custom HTML attributes. Doesn't look great to me, and would pollute my Liveview templates with a matryoshka doll of nested logic: There's a top-level Elixir module, which contains a HEEX string that creates HTML, which itself contains Alpine.js logic as an attribute.
Feels cleaner to me to just create a new .js file that exports a controller, and just instantiate it from LiveView (which still pollutes the HTML, but much less than Alpine does)
That said, there is no good or bad answer. Alpine or Stimulus are certainly better than instantiating Vue or React. HTMX could fit very nicely as well. Use what you're comfortable with.
Rails, it was this one 17 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzj723LkRJY
Live View, I'm not sure which is the first demo. There's "Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI)