Superglue

Use classic Rails to build rich React Redux applications with NO APIs and NO client-side routing.

Superglue is a React Redux starter and library inspired by Turbolinks and designed to complement classic Rails. You can enjoy the benefits of Redux state management and React components without giving up the productivity of Rails form helpers, UJS, tag helpers, the flash, cookie auth, and more.

Caution

This project is in its early phases of development. Its interface, behavior, and name are likely to change drastically before a major version release.

No APIs

Instead of APIs, Superglue leans on Rail's ability to respond to different mime types on the same route. In a Superglue application, if you direct your browser to /dashboard.html, you would see the HTML version of the content, and if you went to /dashboard.json you would see the JSON version of the exact same content down to the footer.

The end result would be something like this:

Powered by Classic Rails

Superglue is mostly classic Rails. Features like the flash, cookie auth, and URL helpers continue to be useful. Here's a look at the directory structure of a typical Rails application with Superglue.

MyRailsApp/
  app/
  views/
  dashboard/
    index.html.erb <- Mostly empty. Where `index.json.props` gets rendered as initial state
    index.js <- Your page component, will receive `index.json.props`. Gets packaged with application.js
    index.json.props <- will also respond to `.json` requests

PropsTemplate

Powering these JSON responses is PropsTemplate, a traversable JSON templating DSL inspired by JBuilder. With PropsTemplate you can specify a path of the node you want, and PropsTemplate will walk the tree to it, skipping the execution of nodes that don't match the keypath.

All together now!

Superglue comes with batteries that bring all the above concepts together to make building popular SPA features easy, painless, and productive.

SPA Navigation

A popular ask of SPAs is page-to-page navigation without reloading. This is easily done with Superglue's own UJS attributes inspired by Turbolinks:

  <a href='/posts' data-sg-visit={true} />

The above will request for /posts with an accept of application/json, and when the client receives the response, swap out the current component for the component the response asks for, and pushState on history.

Partial updates

Some features rely on updating some parts of the existing page. In addition to data-sg-visit and it's equivalent this.props.visit, Superglue also provides data-sg-remote or this.props.remote, which you can use to update parts of your page in async fashion without changing window.history.

Imagine having to implement search, where you enter some text, hit enter, and results would show without reloading the screen. In traditional applications, you may need a new controller, routes, a discussion over versioning, JSON serializer, plenty of new JS code, etc.

With Superglue, this can be done in one line:

  this.props.remote('/dashboard?qry=haircut&props_at=data.header.search')

The above will make a request to /dashboard?qry=haircut, walk your props to the data.header.search node, return it in the response, and immutably graft it in the exact same path on the redux store before finally letting React re-render.

For more on what you can do, check out our documentation.

Server-Side Rendering

Server-Side Rendering is supported via Humid. See the documentation for server-side rendering.

Documentation

Documentation is hosted on Github pages.

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING document. Thank you, contributors!

Special Thanks

Thanks to jbuilder, scour, turbolinks3, turbograft, turbostreamer