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0 pointsomnimus3y ago0 comments

Why Hotwire instead of Livewire if i may ask?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

0xblinq3y ago· 2 in thread

Mostly due to Turbo transitions between pages and being able to persist elements across pages. I know Livewire V3 will solve this but at the time we took the decision it wasn't available.

Also something brought up was a conversation regarding Alpine vs Stimulus. At first sight Alpine looked a lot easier, but Stimulus seemed it would scale better and be easier to maintain at the end, plus we expected it to have less problems with Turbo than Alpine given those were made to work together.

An important difference we found, is that Stimulus can "react" to value changes (https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/reference/values) while with Alpine it was not clear how a component, or some external code would trigger an update by changing a "prop" or an "attribute" of the element. We know we could use stores and events, etc but that's what I meant with stimulus being easier to scale long term.

omnimusOP3y ago

Interesting. I had the feeling that framework like that has to be so tied to the backend framework that Hotwire has to have lots of troubles outside Rails. I would have never even thought of trying Hotwire with Laravel. Will try. Thanks

0xblinq3y ago

Yes, that was my initial impression years ago too.

But it's very progressive. For example, you can just use Turbo to get the "SPA like" navigation between pages (no full page reloads) and that's for free, just including it will bring in that behaviour, plus caching when navigating back, link preloading (so when you click the content it's already there), etc. All of this very easy to control/configure via html data attributes.

Integrating the "Turbo frames" feature is also pretty easy, just wrap content in <turbo-frame> custom tags and the library will do the replacement without page reloads when you submit a form. Similar situation with "Turbo stream", etc.

This is an excerpt from the main documentation site at https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/introduction :

"...You don’t need any backend framework to use Turbo. All the features are built to be used directly, without further abstractions. But if you have the opportunity to use a backend framework that’s integrated with Turbo, you’ll find life a lot simpler. We’ve created a reference implementation for such an integration for Ruby on Rails...."

Same story with Stimulus. You can add it to any framework, it's just a frontend library.

Having said that, there are some "helpers" that you can have in the backend that will make things more idiomatic and avoid some boilerplate, etc. And Laravel being such an amazing framework with such a great community, has a great integration library here: https://github.com/tonysm/turbo-laravel

I couldn't be happier with this stack. With Laravel + Hotwire + Tailwind + Laracasts I feel I'm unstoppable.

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