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Comment by FBISurveillance | Hacker News Reader

I love Rails and spent a good chunk of my career using it - and I'd recommend it more if only the frontend story wasn't that bumpy over the years with all the variations of asset pipelines.

I wish the TypeScript/React integration was easier. Say what you will but there's no way you can achieve interactivity and convenience of React (et al) UIs with Turbo/Hotwire in a meaningful time.

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Agreed re asset pipelines. I definitely have Webpacker related scar tissue.

Have you tried either Inertia (https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia-rails) or vite-ruby (https://vite-ruby.netlify.app/)? Both look very promising.

I converted from webpacker (or rather shakapacker, the continuation after rails moved away from webpacker) to vite_rails recently, and it's been such a breath of fresh air. It's easy to set up, and easier to maintain. Strongly recommended.

Can you elaborate more in this? Years ago, I used to primarily do Rails development. Recently I built some web apps that use a JVM backend (one app uses Java & Spring and the other Kotlin & Micronaut) and a React frontend. One thing I ended up really missing issue the the frameworks, especially with disjointed fronted, don't solve the standard issue of a request sending an invalid form entry and showing the validation errors on the form. I ended up building my own implementation of that which of course also requires a convention on message format. Since most apps need to solve this it's so weird to be that frameworks nowadays don't solve this out of the box.

I definitely suggest using vite and the vite ruby gem. Create your Rails app, Create your TS + React app with vite, add the vite gem and done. It does not get better than that. Super fantastic.

Try React on Rails [1]. I’ve found it to be a very pleasant development experience.

[1] https://github.com/shakacode/react_on_rails

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