> Especially if you're working on something that requires interaction with the page that you will be repeating over and over again.
That’s honestly not that many things IRL. If you look at all the things you build only a minority actual demand high interactivity, or highly custom JS. Otherwise existing UI libraries cover the bulk of what people actually need to do on the internet (ie, not just whatever overly fancy original idea the designers think is needed for your special product idea).
It’s mostly just dropdowns and text and tables etc.
Once you try moving away from all of that and questioning if you need it at every step you’ll realize you really don’t.
It should be server driven web by default with a splattering of high functionality islands of JS. That’s what rails figured out after changing the frontend back and forth.
> Even with auto reload in PHP, .NET, etc you will be wasting so much time
Rails has a library that will refresh the page when files change without a full reload, using Turbo/Hotwire. Not quite HMR but it’s not massively different if your page isn’t a giant pile of JS, and loads quickly already.
> What if you have a modal opened with some state?
Stimulus controllers can store state.
> Or a form filled with data?
Again, you can either use a Stimulus controller, or you can just render the data into the form response, depending on the situation.
> Or some multi-selection in a list of items that triggers a menu of actions on those items?
So, submenus? Again, you can either do it in a Stimulus controller (you can even trivially do things like provide a new submenu on the fly via Turbo), or you can pre-render the entire menu tree server-side and update just the portion that changes.
We're talking about two entirely different things that lead to the same outcome. The approach we're describing is not a "hot reload" per se, it's just selectively updating the changed contents of the page. For the vast majority of the changes you do during development, this is invisible to you.
If you change the JS or the controller itself, obviously, state stored in JS would be lost unless you persisted it locally somehow.
That’s honestly not that many things IRL. If you look at all the things you build only a minority actual demand high interactivity, or highly custom JS. Otherwise existing UI libraries cover the bulk of what people actually need to do on the internet (ie, not just whatever overly fancy original idea the designers think is needed for your special product idea).
It’s mostly just dropdowns and text and tables etc.
Once you try moving away from all of that and questioning if you need it at every step you’ll realize you really don’t.
It should be server driven web by default with a splattering of high functionality islands of JS. That’s what rails figured out after changing the frontend back and forth.
> Even with auto reload in PHP, .NET, etc you will be wasting so much time
Rails has a library that will refresh the page when files change without a full reload, using Turbo/Hotwire. Not quite HMR but it’s not massively different if your page isn’t a giant pile of JS, and loads quickly already.