Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Stimulus and Ajax

Even though “the Hotwire way” is all about sending and receiving HTML between the client and the server, you may still need to receive plain data sometimes. For example, you may have a legacy API section of your code, or it may be useful to call a third-party API from your client. Let’s look at how we would make those API calls in our Stimulus code.

The simplest mechanism for making Ajax calls in modern JavaScript is with the fetch function and the async/await syntax for handling asynchronous behavior. (The Rails UJS library provides an ajax method, but the fetch function is easier to integrate with more modern JavaScript because the Rails ajax method does not use JavaScript promises. And Rails UJS might get deprecated any ...