[rajangdavis]

I agree. There are instances where I think returning HTML instead of JSON works (think of Rails Actioncable or Phoenix Channels), but I have a hard time conceptually understanding what problem is solved by this library.

Thinking of almost all of the full stack, I feel like you could have more flexibility with something like Rails with Angular on the front-end. You can set up a Rails controller to return JSON or HTML depending on the request type.

Throw in UI Router and have your Angular routes match your Rails routes... You can have your pages rendered server and client side and still have the flexibility to render JSON.

It would be sick if there was a stack where you can take make your routes more functional and have the routing work clientside and serverside. I know Turbolinks is supposed to solve this problem, but it sort of messes up how events are fired.

Also, Angular templates cannot be modified on the front end... but these intercooler attributes can.

I will admit, the author is probably solving a problem that I haven't encountered or even fully understand. If people are digging it, more power to him.

[rimantas]

And that's how the monstrosities are born.

[rajangdavis]

I work primarily with a legacy, enterprise PHP application and it is a monstrosity (large number of classes, breaking framework changes, deprecated front-end libraries, very old MVC patterns, heavily imperative).

There are elements that Rails (predictable routing, simplified MVC, templating rendering, and general ease of set up and deployment) and Angular (flexibility, directives, safe templates, state based routing, imperative but can be functional with filters) provide the feature set that I have described above (aside from the routing object idea for generating server and client side routing).

The underlying technologies are not important; Node already has isomorphic javascript. I think Phoenix might be on track to remove the need for a heavy use of javascript for creating a single page application by simply using channels.

However, I cannot speak on Node and Phoenix because I lack the experience with these languages to comment. I do have experience with Rails and Angular to generate an example of how I would like a full stack, AJAX heavy application to work.

[cx1000]

Yeah he lost me at "angular"

[rajangdavis]

Why? There are plenty of developers that use Angular.

If I speak from a place of experience, is that less valid if I use a language that you do not particularly like?

It is not always the correct language in a lot of cases, but it can be for creating the feature set that I have described above - an approach for a more functional application structure that would provide server and client-side routing without Turbolinks.

You don't even need Angular or Rails for this, but these are both tools that I have enough familiarity with to know that it would work.

[cx1000]

Because 1) the appeal of intercooler is its simplicity, and 2) I don't know angular and don't have any desire to learn it. It looks complicated, and on the decline: http://stateofjs.com/2016/frontend/.

It's not a language it's a framework. And it will take me (and others on my team) time to learn it, and maintain it in the future. But if you like it, more power to you!