[agmcleod]

I agree it's not the complete solution, but I think rails does a pretty good job at providing tools for making a progressive webapp. Many of us see the apps that have a blank page until data is loaded and the front end JS then renders. It's just a yuck experience. I dislike the fact that it happens in one of my own projects. While I find the concept of turbo links weird with pulling raw html over XHR and then rendering it, it does essentially just speed up a non-js capable website.

In time rails will need to replace this out, as the JS tooling keeps evolving, better solutions will arise.

[sanderjd]

The "blank page" argument was once fairly compelling, but both React and Ember (that I know of) have been increasingly successful at solving that issue.

[agmcleod]

For sure. I've found getting that to work with a rails stack & webpack setup to be rather challenging. react_rails is pretty straight forward, but then you have a lot of global react components, and it gets trickier to leverage NPM. With webpack there's react_on_rails which is a sizable & complex gem, but it does work.

While I wouldn't use vanilla rails & UJS much today, I still think it has value in getting things going.

[fbonetti]

React's server-side rendering solves the blank page issue.