0X0xblinq·Jan 31, 2023
Yes, that was my initial impression years ago too.
But it's very progressive. For example, you can just use Turbo to get the "SPA like" navigation between pages (no full page reloads) and that's for free, just including it will bring in that behaviour, plus caching when navigating back, link preloading (so when you click the content it's already there), etc. All of this very easy to control/configure via html data attributes.
Integrating the "Turbo frames" feature is also pretty easy, just wrap content in <turbo-frame> custom tags and the library will do the replacement without page reloads when you submit a form. Similar situation with "Turbo stream", etc.
This is an excerpt from the main documentation site at https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/introduction :
"...You don’t need any backend framework to use Turbo. All the features are bu
Read the rest
ilt to be used directly, without further abstractions. But if you have the opportunity to use a backend framework that’s integrated with Turbo, you’ll find life a lot simpler. We’ve created a reference implementation for such an integration for Ruby on Rails...."
Same story with Stimulus. You can add it to any framework, it's just a frontend library.
Having said that, there are some "helpers" that you can have in the backend that will make things more idiomatic and avoid some boilerplate, etc. And Laravel being such an amazing framework with such a great community, has a great integration library here: https://github.com/tonysm/turbo-laravel
I couldn't be happier with this stack. With Laravel + Hotwire + Tailwind + Laracasts I feel I'm unstoppable.