37signals Dev — Exploring server-side diffing in Turbo

We did a lot of exploratory work before coming up with the Turbo improvement we presented in Rails World. One of those experiments included diffing in the server instead of in the client.The ideaThe inspiration for this idea came, again, from Phoenix Live View, a library I find fascinating. Live View’s approach based on stateful WebSocket connections isn’t a good match for the Turbo’s progressive enhancement philosophy we love, but its rendering pipeline is an engineering wonder full of great ideas. I learned about morphing because Live View uses it at the end of the pipeline, and I thought of server-side diffing because that’s what Live View does at the beginning of it.That’s why, after seeing that morphing worked in the scenarios we wanted, I decided to explore server-side diffing, too. Some fuzzy questions I had in mind were:.