RR 420: Stimulus

Today’s topic is the Stimulus library. Stimulus is actually a JavaScript framework and library, but it’s also built by Basecamp, so it works really well in Rails. There is a demand for rich client side interactions, and Stimulus fills in some of the gaps. The panelists talk about some of their experiences with Stimulus versus jQuery. They talk about different use cases for Stimulus, how it works, and how it can help your project. One of the main draws of Stimulus is that the amount of code needed to implement a feature with Stimulus is very small comparatively. Also, frameworks like React weren’t created for Rails, and so adding React to a Rails application can be quite painful. Stimulus follows the Rails philosophy to keep things simple and unobtrusive, so if you ever found that Stimulus was not a right fit for your application, extracting it would be a major overhaul.