Modern Front-End Development for Rails, 2nd Edition

What Is Stimulus?

Stimulus is a small tool.^[33] Its own website describes it as “a modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have.” Where React tries to replace your entire view layer, Stimulus allows you to handle a common JavaScript pattern quickly and without much extra complication. That pattern is, “an event happens, and I’d like to update the DOM in response to it.”

Stimulus’s main concepts simplify the process of creating the relationship between an event and the code that gets invoked in response. If you weren’t using Stimulus, you’d likely try to handle these interactions with jQuery or just using native DOM methods without a framework at all. Stimulus, like Rails, was originally built by Basecamp, and has many convention-over-configuration ...