Week 42 - Two Years of Hotwire Weekly!
Discover the latest Hotwire insights, tutorials, and releases in this week edition of Hotwire Weekly!
Celebrating 2 Years of Hotwire Weekly! 🎉
This issue marks two years of Hotwire Weekly! Every week since launch, we’ve shared the latest news, tutorials, and projects from the Hotwire community.
Thank you for following along and supporting the newsletter!
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📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos
Render a Component Preview In Showcase for Ruby on Rails - Alexandre Ruban on the App Signal Blog walks through how the showcase-rails engine renders component previews: it leverages a Showcase::Preview class fed by metadata in preview templates to generate clean, documented views of UI components, ideal for design systems and component libraries.
Detecting Slow Connections and Network Issues in Real-Time with Stimulus - Macu Gnazo on the Unagi Blog details how they built a lightweight Rails + Stimulus system that pings a simple health-endpoint every few seconds, measures response latency, and shows banners when the connection is "slow" or "offline" to improve UX in real-time apps.
How does Turbo work with Action Cable? - Sid Krishnan explains how Turbo Rails uses Action Cable behind the scenes: you subscribe to streams with turbo_stream_from, broadcast HTML-wrapped <turbo-stream> tags from the server, and the client automatically listens over WebSockets to apply live updates to the DOM.
Lexxy - The next generation rich text editor for Rails - Chetan Gawai on the Saeloun Blog talks about Lexxy, built on Meta’s Lexical, as a modern replacement for Trix in Rails. It offers real HTML markup, all tightly integrated with Action Text and Active Storage.
Debugging Hotwire Native - Start with the Obvious Questions - William Kennedy continues his Hotwire Native debugging series, outlining the core questions you should ask when your hybrid app misbehaves.
Optimistic Drawer UI with Inertia.js and Rails - Brian Knoles published a video on YouTube in which he demonstrates how to build a drawer component in Rails with Inertia.js that feels snappy even under latency by managing state on the server and using Inertia’s client-side visits for optimistic updates.
A refreshing take: using serverside rendering to reduce fragile DOM state - Simon Fish shows how shifting away from front-heavy client-side mutations back to server-rendered HTML can simplify maintenance, reduce state bugs, and pair seamlessly with libraries like Turbo and Hotwire for more robust Rails UIs.
🎉 Releases
hotwire-livereload v2.1.0 and v2.1.1 - Live reload gem for Hotwire Rails apps.
shakapacker v9.3.0.beta.0 - v9.3.0.beta.6 - Use webpack to manage app-like JavaScript modules in Rails.
reactionview v0.1.5 - Powerful and seamless HTML-aware ERB parsing and tooling.
proscenium v0.21.0 - v0.21.3 - Modern client-side development for Rails.
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See you next week!