Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!

Happy New Year, and welcome to the first 2026 edition of Hotwire Weekly! We took a short break over the New Year, but we’re excited to be back and kicking things off for 2026. Happy reading! 🚀

📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos

jQuery 4.0.0 released - The jQuery Team shipped jQuery 4.0.0, marking a major release more than 20 years after the project’s original launch. It dropped Internet Explorer support and migrated its code to modern ES Modules.

Introducing CSS Grid Lanes - The WebKit Team announces CSS Grid Lanes, a new grid layout feature that lets you define named lanes between tracks and place items relative to those lanes. This makes complex grid layouts more predictable and easier to write without extra wrappers.

Inertia.js in Rails: a new era of effortless integration - Svyat Kryukov on the Evil Martians blog outlines how Inertia.js lets you build modern Rails apps with rich JavaScript UI components (React, Vue, or Svelte) without a separate API layer, client-side routing, or complex state management.

How to detect Safari and iOS versions with ease in 2026 - Evgeniy Valyaev on the Evil Martians blog shares reliable techniques for detecting Safari and iOS versions using feature tests and focused user-agent hints, helping developers tailor behavior and avoid fragile User Agent parsing.

Exploring Rails Action Cable with Solid Cable - Jeffery Morhous on the Honeybadger blog walks through using Action Cable in Rails 8 along with the new Solid Cable adapter, showing how you can build real-time features like a chat room without needing Redis by using your database for WebSocket message delivery instead.

Use native dialog with Turbo (and no extra JavaScript - Rails Designer shows how to combine native HTML <dialog> with Turbo Frames to create accessible, lightweight modals in Rails without heavy JavaScript, using Turbo to fetch and render the dialog content dynamically.

Live Countdowns Without JavaScript: Turbo Streams + relative_time_in_words - Simon Chiu shows how to build live countdown timers in Rails using Turbo Frames and minimal JavaScript, updating the UI in real time as time ticks down without full page reloads.

Writing Tailwind-compatible Semantic CSS - Stephen Margheim shows how to write semantic, utility-friendly CSS that works seamlessly with Tailwind by using utility patterns, CSS custom properties, and thoughtful class naming.

AI on Rails: Broadcasting Messages Live with Turbo Streams - Rapid Ruby published a video in which he demonstrates how to refactor a messages feature in Rails to use Turbo Streams for real-time broadcasting, showing how new messages can be pushed live to clients without full page reloads.

Drifting Ruby: @rails/request.js - Dave Kimura published a new Drifting Ruby episode about the handy @rails/request.js package.

🧰 Libraries and Tools

Laravel + Hotwire Starter Kit - A community-built starter kit to build Hotwired apps with Laravel.

🎉 Releases

herb v0.8.8 - Powerful and seamless HTML-aware ERB parsing and tooling.

lexxy v0.7.2.beta - A modern rich text editor for Rails.

turbo v8.0.21 - The speed of a single-page web application without having to write any JavaScript.

turbo-rails v2.0.21 - Turbo for Rails.

hotwire-native-android v1.2.5 - Hotwire Native for Android.

importmap-rails v2.2.3 - Use ESM with importmap to manage modern JavaScript in Rails without transpiling or bundling.

inertia-rails v3.16.0 - The Rails adapter for Inertia.js.

inertia_rails-contrib v0.5.2 - A collection of extensions and developer tools for Inertia's Rails adapter.

symfony/ux v2.32.0 - A JavaScript ecosystem for Symfony, built using Stimulus.

rich-text-laravel v3.4.0 - A Trix-like editor for Laravel.

django-turbo-helper v2.1.5 - Turbo Helpers for Django.

nitro_kit v0.9.0 - A good-to-go UI kit for Ruby on Rails.

view_component v4.2.0 - A framework for building reusable, testable & encapsulated view components.

shakapacker v9.5.0 - Use webpack to manage app-like JavaScript modules in Rails.

vite_rails v3.0.20 - Use Vite in Rails and bring joy to your JavaScript experience.

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See you next week!