[jblake]

jQuery.

I'm the sole developer on a "rails monolith" (254 tables, 540 models/classes, 4 years old), with enterprise-like architecture (ecommerce, event ticket sales, booking engine, access control, etc) and I'm positive the only way I'm able handle it all is because I stick to basic jquery.

My secrets:

- The rails-ujs adapter

- $(document).on('event', '.element', ..) is fantastic. Never debug events ever again

- selectize select's for "find or create" relationships

- cocoon gem for nested form relationships

- parsley for form validation (hooks into html5 validators)

- bootstrap 3

- datatables.net + following the pattern of ajax-datatables-rails (gem - separate classes for each table)

- a single javascript function that accepts a DOM element (body, a modal, section) and initializes all the elements the app knows of (selectize elements, date/time pickers, etc) inside that container

- above function is hooked into by bootstrap's 'bs.modal.shown, bs.modal.hide, tab's, cocoon's 'cocoon:after-insert', etc.

rake stats says: 33k LOC models, 8k LOC controllers, 23k Javascript (though this must be all plugins. I'd guess 3-6k lines of javascript, max)

Needless to say, I don't believe in the frontend javascript hype.

[sbank]

Thank you for this comment. Several things there that I will look into! If you don't mind, could you elaborate a bit on the following:

> - $(document).on('event', '.element', ..) is fantastic. Never debug events ever again

> - a single javascript function that accepts a DOM element (body, a modal, section) and initializes all the elements the app knows of (selectize elements, date/time pickers, etc) inside that container

[jblake]

$(document).on lets you keep your javascript source files relatively flat because the event handler listens on the document, rather than an individual element. So even if the element is not currently on the page (loaded in via AJAX for example) the $(document).on handler will still pick it up. You never need to bind or unbind event handlers manually. The rails recommended way is to respond to the JS format and do server-rendered javascript.... but I tend to prefer using a simple data-transport-only (JSON) api, then do the client stuff on the client side.

Simple example:

  $(document).on 'ajax:success', '.guest-form', ->
    notify 'success', 'Guest updated.'
    $(@).parents('.modal').modal 'hide'


  $(document).ajaxError (event, jqxhr, settings, thrownError) ->
  handle_ajax_error(event, jqxhr)


  @handle_ajax_error = (error, xhr) ->
  if xhr.status is 422
    error = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText)['errors']
    notify 'error', error
  else if xhr.status is 500
    notify 'error', 'Error communicating with the server. We have been notified.'
  if xhr.status is 401
    notify 'warning', 'Session has expired. Redirecting to login...'
    window.location = '/login'
  if xhr.status is 403
    window.location = '/access-denied'

So if you load in content via AJAX (I do this a lot for table views of data and the user wants to see a single record), rather than go to a separate page, I do an ajax call, put the result into a Twitter bootstrap modal, show the modal, and when the bs.modal.shown event fires, that "single javascript function" with the modal as the parameter is called, and it initializes all the javascript needed for that particular DOM container.

Example:

  $(document).on 'shown.bs.modal', 'a[data-toggle="tab"]', (e) ->

    $modal_body = $( $(e.target).attr('href') )
    general_init $modal_body

The general_init function will initialize all my selectize elements (among other things) as such:

  general_init = ($container) ->
    add_selectize $container.find('input.membership-plan-select'), $.extend(true, {}, Selects.MembershipPlanOptions)

So when writing forms, lets say to create a new "Event Ticket" I simply plop in a text field with a class of "guest-select" and I instantly have an AJAX powered search field to find/create a guest to assign that ticket to.

[sbank]

Thanks a lot for the detailed response! I'm a Rails developer myself, and have recently become increasingly interested in front end development. Have tried to embrace React et al. but am not convinced that it's what I need.

[CircleJerk]

That's amazing! Believe it or not I was mocking a very similar thing (besides rails). And select2. What made me rethink was the heavy dependencie on using datatables and mobile compatibility. Am I worrying too much and datatables.net "just works"?

[jblake]

Thanks! That's a really good point - and it's currently one of the codebases biggest weaknesses. I use DataTables EVERYwhere. They're fantastic - I have tons of places where I need to show thousands of records, so I use server side processing for pagination, filtering, sorting, etc. However, they don't look good on mobile, and the responsive tables plugin is not the greatest. What I actually do (for now) is wrap the table in Twitter Bootstraps .table-responsive class, which basically creates a viewport for the table on mobile. You scroll left/right to see hidden columns. Works pretty well. Long term, I'm not sure what I am going to do as there are no other table plugins with as rich a featureset and I prefer not to write my own.