Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Chapter 1Getting Started with Client-Side Rails

Every modern web application uses client-side features in an effort to improve the end-user experience. Even though Rails is a server-side framework, it has always offered tools that made it easier to deliver client-side code to the browser. From the very beginning of Rails, its ability to make client-side coding easier has been a selling point.

Over time the client-side tools have become more powerful, which is great, and more complicated, which is less great. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that Rails still has opinions about how to deal with the client tools.

In this book, we’re going to take a basic Rails application and add client-side interactivity. The JavaScript ecosystem includes ...