Master Turbo Streams: Essential Tips for Ruby on Rails 7 Beginners (2024)

FAQs

Does Rails 7 use Turbolinks? ›

When Rails 7 made its first appearance in December of 2021 a new default component was introduced called Turbo. If you have any history with Rails you might remember the Turbolinks library which is the predecessor of Turbo. Unlike JavaScript-driven applications, Rails applications are historically server-side rendered.

Even if the examples are written with links, those rules apply for both links and forms! Rule 1: When clicking on a link within a Turbo Frame, Turbo expects a frame of the same id on the target page. It will then replace the Frame's content on the source page with the Frame's content on the target page.

While both Turbo Frames and Streams let us manipulate elements on an HTML page, they differ in the following ways. Turbo Frames only manipulate themselves, and this manipulation is always an update. Turbo Streams, on the other hand, can manipulate any DOM element anywhere on the page.

Turbo Streams: Real-time Updates Without Full Page Reloads:

Turbo Streams can be triggered by various events like form submissions, button clicks, or even server-side broadcasts. Here's how they work: Server-side Updates: Your Rails application generates HTML markup representing the updated content.

Highlights in Rails 7.0: Ruby 2.7. 0+ required, Ruby 3.0+ preferred.

Netflix uses the Ruby on Rails framework to help with the overall architecture of its platform, and it has helped Netflix with scalability and growing demands. Why is Ruby on Rails not popular? The Ruby on Rails framework is declining in popularity because it's old and difficult to learn.

A turbo frame is a node of the DOM that is able to be replaced by another, without refreshing the browser (when the user clicks on a button for example). Think about the old days where you had to update the DOM through an ajax request (without a full page reload).

So literally, Hotwire refers to the idea of sending HTML instead of data. Hotwire is the default front-end framework for Ruby on Rails applications. It is a combination of Stimulus, Turbo, and Turbo Drive. It was introduced in Ruby on Rails 6 as an optional feature.

You can use it on POST requests after form submissions or button clicks to update multiple elements on your website. You can also use them on GET requests via link clicks. In a nutshell, Turbo Streams allow you to target multiple parts on the page, and also let you append to, prepend to, or remove existing content.

What is the difference between update and replace in turbo Stream? ›

When you update something, you replace its contents, and any handlers bound to the container would be retained in the browser. When you replace it, you would completely remove the container and then insert a new container into the DOM.

Stimulus for Rails. Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn't seek to take over your entire front-end in fact, it's not concerned with rendering HTML at all. Instead, it's designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it shine.

Rails 7 was a welcome release that brought a lot of significant features and changes. On the backend, Rails 7 introduced asynchronous query loading and Zeitwerk for autoloading. The frontend saw Hotwire becoming the default solution for new Rails apps.

Turbo provides the performance of a single-page web application without the need for any JavaScript. Turbo speeds up links and forms submissions without changing our server-side generated HTML. It allows us to divide a page into different frames that can be lazy-loaded and used as standalone components.

If you want to disable Turbolinks for certain links, add a data-turbolinks="false" attribute to the tag: < a href = "..." data-turbolinks = "false" >No turbolinks here</ a >.

Turbolinks Overview

It is intended to speed up navigating between pages of your application. It works by intercepting all link clicks that would navigate to a page within the app, and instead makes the request via AJAX, replacing the body with the received content.

In Rails 6, Node and Yarn were required to manage the JavaScript used by a Rails application. Rails 7 no longer depends on Node and Yarn and has new options for integrating JavaScript. You can skip these instructions and skip ahead to install Ruby.