Modern Front-End Development for Rails

The Hotwire Way

Hotwire is the generic name for the client-side toolkit written by the Basecamp team to power the Hey email application.^[31][32] The goal of Hotwire is to support an application where most of the dynamic nature happens by making normal HTTP requests to the server, receiving HTML for a part of the page, and inserting that HTML in the correct place in the DOM for a page update. (The name Hotwire is derived from the phrase, “HTML over the wire.”)

The idea is that by moving all the logic to the server, you can replace a lot of complicated and specific client-side code with a small set of generic client-side actions that handle retrieving and managing HTML from the server. You still have to write the logic server side, but the bet ...