Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Comparison

I honestly wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I started this exercise. Here’s what I think I can say for sure:

React has more setup and boilerplate code. Because both of these pages are relatively simple, that means that there’s more React code for both of them. In the case of the schedule page, there’s a lot more code. Having done the concert page now three times— React, Stimulus-only (for the first drafts of this book), and Hotwire—I was still surprised how little client-side code the Hotwire version required.

There’s one place where React has less code, which is in actually tying value changes to update DOM elements. This happens automatically in React when the state changes, but Hotwire requires you to explicitly trigger ...