[thirdsun]

As a developer that recently made the transition from FileMaker, which is very user-friendly but limiting, to Rails, I love the new possibilities and the fact that Rails provides nearly everything I need and comes with established best practices, but I'm always a little helpless when interactivity (without reloading the page) is required. The apps I'm working on (internal, business apps) mostly work perfectly fine with a document-based approach and most features can be integrated as simple CRUD actions, but from time to time I need just a little interactivity - like in a classic scenario of an order with several line items that needs to calculate and display totals in a form as soon as the input changes. It's that simple, no need for a framework, even most libraries feel overblown for that use case.

I looked at various data-binding javascript libraries, but they all seem like targeting much bigger problems than mine. So I resort to classic jquery, data attributes and ajax calls, but it feels very messy, like a hack not intended to work that way. It may be the fact that I'm new to this but it feels as if I'm missing something very obvious whenever I have to deal with that kind of very basic interactivity and dynamic. It's a simple form that temporarily needs to calculate and process inputs until the user saves the record and solving this seems way too complicated and messy. Are there any options for those simple cases and apps that otherwise would do just fine with a document-based architecture?

[rapind]

You might want to play with React and it's ilk. It's basically a framework for only the view, and it's pretty easy to reason about once you wrap your head around it. You're just asking for calculated fields on change events right?

jQuery is fine for this too, but can become painful to use and organize once you have a lot of DOM manipulations.

React only starts to get complicated once you dive into the Routing + Data Fetching + Flux stuff IMO. React on it's own if you don't need any of that is pretty simple.

[fastball]

I found that my experience with Dart seems to meet those criteria nicely.

https://www.dartlang.org/

[lastofus]

I found Knockout to be a great middle ground for when "I can do this in jQuery, but it's gona be messy" and "I'm building a SPA".

It hits the sweet spot between easy learning curve, abstraction, and interacting with the DOM nicely.

Sadly, it's not as hip as React/Angular/Ember these days.

[muraiki]

I've also had a good experience using Knockout. I used it to add some interactivity to a largely static site, and then expanded its use to create a fairly complex management interface. It's easy to pick up with great interactive tutorials on the web site, and with component support in the latest version you can build some larger web apps.

Microsoft uses it their recent remake of their Azure portal; this page has a video on building large apps with Knockout: http://jbeckwith.com/2014/09/20/how-the-azure-portal-works/