Breezy
Use classic Rails to build rich React Redux applications with NO APIs and NO client-side routing.
Breezy is a React Redux starter and library inspired by Turbolinks and designed to complement classic Rails. You can enjoy the benefits of Redux state management and React components without giving up the productivity of Rails form helpers, UJS, tag helpers, the flash, cookie auth, and more.
Caution
This project is in its early phases of development. Its interface, behavior, and name are likely to change drastically before a major version release.
No APIs
Instead of APIs, Breezy leans on Rail's ability to respond to different
mime types
on the same route. In a Breezy application, if you direct your browser to
/dashboard.html, you would see the HTML version of the content, and if you
went to /dashboard.json you would see the JSON version of the exact same
content down to the footer.
The end result would be something like this:
Powered by Classic Rails
Breezy is mostly classic Rails. Features like the flash, cookie auth, and URL helpers continue to be useful. Here's a look at the directory structure of a typical Rails application with Breezy.
MyRailsApp/
app/
views/
dashboard/
index.html.erb <- Mostly empty. Where `index.json.props` gets rendered as initial state
index.js <- Your page component, will receive `index.json.props`. Gets packaged with application.js
index.json.props <- will also respond to `.json` requests
PropsTemplate
Powering these JSON responses is PropsTemplate, a traversable JSON templating DSL inspired by JBuilder. With PropsTemplate you can specify a path of the node you want, and PropsTemplate will walk the tree to it, skipping the execution of nodes that don't match the keypath.
All together now!
Breezy comes with batteries that bring all the above concepts together to make building popular SPA features easy, painless, and productive.
SPA Navigation
A popular ask of SPAs is page-to-page navigation without reloading. This is easily done with Breezy's own UJS attributes inspired by Turbolinks:
<a href='/posts' data-bz-visit={true} />The above will request for /posts with an accept of application/json, and
when the client receives the response, swap out the current component for the
component the response asks for, and pushState on history.
Partial updates
Some features rely on updating some parts of the existing page. In
addition to data-bz-visit and it's equivalent this.props.visit, Breezy
also provides data-bz-remote or this.props.remote, which you can use to
update parts of your page in async fashion without changing window.history.
Imagine having to implement search, where you enter some text, hit enter, and results would show without reloading the screen. In traditional applications, you may need a new controller, routes, a discussion over versioning, JSON serializer, plenty of new JS code, etc.
With Breezy, this can be done in one line:
this.props.remote('/dashboard?qry=haircut&bzq=data.header.search')The above will make a request to /dashboard?qry=haircut, walk your props to
the data.header.search node, return it in the response, and immutably graft it
in the exact same path on the redux store before finally letting React
re-render.
For more on what you can do, check out our documentation.
Server-Side Rendering
Server-Side Rendering is supported via Humid. See the documentation for server-side rendering.
Documentation
Documentation is hosted on Gitbook. Be sure
to select the correct version. main will always be in development.
Contributing
See the CONTRIBUTING document. Thank you, contributors!
Special Thanks
Thanks to jbuilder, scour, turbolinks3, turbograft, turbostreamer