The guy who built Ruby-on-Rails, the world’s slowest framework, has finally more or less given up frameworks!
I’m working on a new Rails application without using any form of real build steps on the front-end. We’re making it using vanilla ES6 with import maps for Hotwire, and vanilla CSS with nesting and variables for styling.
For performance reasons: “It’s also fast. Really fast. Infinitely fast.”
Or to be fashionable. DHH is determined to be ahead of the mob. While outflanking trendiness has kept him running fast, he’s more or less succeeded.
David Heinemeier Hansson is quite right this time. Frameworks are complicated crutches which slow down websites and cripple long-term maintenance unless you are willing to invest in all your teams learning these ever changing frameworks.
To require javascript to display “Hello world”, a brochure website or even a basic weblog is adding complexity for complexity’s sake. The web was fundamentally about communication and it should stay that way. Anyone who stands in the way of straightforward communication is positioning him or herself as a toll gate, a pay barrier (whether in treasure or time).
The one web application which we usually regularly which genuinely takes advantage of a framework to provide superior performance and superior use experience is forum software Discourse. What the StackOverflow (now their own team) under Jeff Atwood created in Ember.js (back end in Ruby on Rails) is astonishingly quick to load pages. Updates, new posts, notifications happen in real time measured in milliseconds, without giving the impression your browser is breathing hard. I have experienced very few, if any, “unsupported browser” notifications. But a huge part of forum software is real-time notifications and interaction, a good forum is a next-door neighbour to chat software.
There’s very few use cases like this one. We can handle real-time notifications in WordPress for comments including notification bell:
We had a go at writing some sites in Tailwind. The idea was interesting: include only the CSS actually used. In the end Tailwind just made builds more difficult as changing anything on the site required a full rebuild.
On the other hand, tools to make it easier to access the native tools built straight into web browsers are most welcome.
If you aren’t wedded to React, Vue, or whatever, you should have a look at what’s possible to build with Hotwire and No Build these days. You just might want to shed the weight of complexity and enjoy the lighter stack.
Learn more at Hotwired.dev.
We plan to.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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